SAN FRANCISCO – January 14, 2009 – Riverbed Technology, Inc. today announced that InfoWorld has named Riverbed Steelhead® appliances running RiOS® 5.0 as the winner of the best WAN Accelerator of 2009 award. InfoWorld has named Riverbed® the leader in WAN acceleration for five years in a row, beginning in 2005 when it first created the category and recognized Riverbed for its innovation and early leadership in the WAN optimization market.

Selected by InfoWorld Test Center editors and reviewers, the annual awards identify the best and most innovative products on the IT landscape. The award is recognition of Riverbed's technology leadership and continued success in delivering best-of-breed WAN optimization solutions that help companies to consolidate IT infrastructure and improve staff productivity and collaboration, while cutting costs. Especially in today's macroeconomic environment, Riverbed has become a must-have IT infrastructure technology to help CIOs do more with less.

Riverbed offers a complete WAN optimization solution that accelerates applications and data for remote offices, data centers, and mobile workers across wide area networks (WANs), accelerating access to applications and data up to 100 times faster. The speed, improved productivity and cost savings delivered by Riverbed solutions allows organizations to be more nimble, flexible and competitive by enabling IT consolidation without sacrificing user performance, allowing higher productivity for remote offices, eliminating end user frustration caused by slow applications, dramatically shortening backup and replication times, reducing traffic on WANs, and even enabling significant improvements in mobile worker productivity. Over 5,000 customers have implemented Riverbed WAN optimization solutions across their geographically dispersed organizations.

According to InfoWorld's Technology of the Year article, "Perennial winner Riverbed still leads the way in WAN acceleration. CIFS and FTP traffic receive excellent speed boosts in the 2008 edition, and the native support for Exchange improves Outlook response over the WAN. An improved QoS engine helps keep traffic flows in line, and three modes of transparency should eliminate any WAN monitoring complaints. New optimizations for dynamic HTTP and a better system for setting up HTTPS connections bring even more value."

With the introduction of RiOS 5.0 in February 2008, Riverbed was the first vendor to provide application-level protocol optimization for Microsoft Exchange 2007. This makes Riverbed the first and the only vendor to accelerate Microsoft Exchange 2000, 2003 and 2007. Also in this release, Riverbed built upon its lead in delivering solutions to enhance IT flexibility and capabilities with new scale, simplicity and security features, including the new Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) for delivering virtualized edge services without the need to deploy additional branch office servers.

"This accomplishment is a result of our product management and development teams staying laser-focused on meeting and exceeding our customers' ever-changing and growing business and IT requirements. Enhancements to our WAN optimization solution are incorporated with the goal of allowing enterprises to make their workforces more efficient while keeping IT infrastructure costs down," said Eric Wolford, senior vice president of product marketing. "We are honored to receive positive industry recognition year after year."

Steelhead Products

Riverbed WAN optimization solutions enable organizations of all sizes to overcome a host of severe problems, including poor application performance and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites. By speeding the performance of applications between data centers, remote offices and mobile workers by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times, the Riverbed award-winning Steelhead products enable companies to consolidate IT, improve backup and replication processes to ensure data integrity, and improve staff productivity and collaboration. Steelhead products have been deployed in organizations ranging from the world's largest corporations with offices around the globe to small companies with a couple of sites that are just miles apart.

About Riverbed

Riverbed Technology is the technology and market leader in WAN optimization solutions for companies worldwide. By enabling application performance over the wide area network (WAN) that is orders of magnitude faster than what users experience today, Riverbed is changing the way people work, and enabling a distributed workforce that can collaborate as if they were local.

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