Riverbed slurps German SD-WAN expert Ocedo

Hardware is so 2013, especially when it ties you to MPLS

Riverbed has announced its first acquisition since 2013: German-based software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) outfit Ocedo.

Ocedo's software suite includes hybrid WAN, various provisioning tools, a connectivity solution designed for AWS users, and a cloudy firewall.

Its pitch is that SD-WANs offer better performance than the venerable MPLS, the protocol of choice for people who need to define the paths their data is going to follow for (for example) data centre links.

Last October, Riverbed launched what it called “Project Tiger”, its push to get beyond its hardware focus and get a foot into the SDN world.

The strategy followed the purchase of Riverbed by private equity outfit Thoma Bravo in December 2014.

Suffering slowing growth in 2014, Riverbed had suffered pressure from Elliott Management and was dragged into that company's ongoing IT-sector Game of Thrones. The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan also bought into the deal.

It'll be a while before Riverbed can wean its growth away from the WAN accelerators that still make up the bulk of its income.

In the last earnings release before it was taken private, Riverbed was ticking over at around US$270 to $280 million per quarter. ®