Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ:RVBD), the leader in application performance infrastructure, is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2014 Riverbed® SteelScript™ Ideas Contest is Lionel Marie, network architect at Schneider Electric, a 176-year-old French firm that specializes in energy management. Using SteelScript, Marie created specific views and reports to give him greater visibility into traffic movement across his hybrid enterprise.
Tweet This: Congrats to @SchneiderElec's Lionel Marie for the most innovative use of the SteelScript open API: rvbd.ly/17Q0XTU #HybridEnterprise
SteelScript is a set of open APIs and developer tools that enable customers and partners to customize and automate Riverbed solutions, extending the value of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform™. The contest was inspired by Riverbed customers’ creative use of SteelScript.
“What I’ve found working with customers is that they’re always creative in terms of what they need,” said Christopher White, director of Riverbed Technology Council and contest judge. “They love the data that we have and they just want to rip the cover off and take hold of that data. So, we put this contest together to bring to the surface some of those ideas.” Customers submitted their ideas to Riverbed Splash, the online Riverbed user group. Input from the Splash community (number of votes garnered) was one of the criteria the judges took into consideration along with originality, creativity, applicability, and feasibility.
The Winner: Internet Traffic Reports for Controlling Capacity and Costs of Cloud Services
Lionel Marie’s idea was to use SteelScript to leverage information collected from SteelCentral™ NetProfiler to create Internet traffic reports that make capacity planning easier, as well as controlling costs associated with SaaS and cloud services providers. The result is high-level visibility into traffic movement based on Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Autonomous Systems (AS) numbers to see where data is going in a company’s vast, hybrid IT environment.
As a network architect for a large multinational corporation, Marie understands the challenges of a hybrid IT environment. Schneider Electric employs more than 150,000 employees in over 130 countries. MPLS and local networks connect 1,000 remote sites to four data centers, where many critical applications have been consolidated. In addition, the company has adopted cloud-based solutions such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), and software as a service (SaaS) such as Salesforce.
“Innovations like cloud computing, SaaS, and IaaS are continually increasing the complexity of today’s IT environment. Companies that can control and manage this complexity will be able to use IT as a competitive business advantage instead of constantly scrambling to solve performance problems of business-critical applications,” said Marie. “The views I created using Riverbed open APIs ease capacity planning of Internet bandwidth/Internet peering, help negotiate costs with upstream transit providers by easily qualifying the most important destinations, and elaborate a peering (public/private) policy to collect the traffic from Internet exchange points.”
Marie’s goal with his SteelScript idea was to improve connectivity to critical destinations (Amazon Web Services, Azure, Salesforce, Box, etc.) by creating views based on traffic exchanged to and from those destinations. With SteelScript, Marie created Internet traffic reports based on BGP AS numbers, which were collected by a SteelCentral NetProfiler appliance.
“We’ve got DPI inspection, which provides the application, and, we’ve got IP addresses to provide the destination. But, with BGP AS numbers, we can actually start to look at broad classifications on where in the hybrid cloud data is going. What Marie has done will provide big, broad classifications based upon well known AS numbers like Google, AWS, and others,” said White.
“I commend Marie’s forward-thinking approach. As we continue to evolve to the hybrid enterprise where the Internet becomes, in fact, a critical part of the infrastructure, having this type of high-level visibility of traffic movement is critical,” said Hansang Bae, chief scientist for Riverbed and a contest judge.
The Riverbed Application Performance Platform™ enables CIOs to deliver, control, and optimize all IT resources across the hybrid enterprise. A key part of the platform, Riverbed SteelScript is the set of open APIs and developer tools for customizing and automating application performance infrastructure from Riverbed. Open APIs facilitate programmability, interoperability, and intelligence across the Riverbed platform and partner ecosystem so that customers can automate the analysis and resolution of performance issues across their IT infrastructure and for their unique business needs.
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About Riverbed
Riverbed, at more than $1 billion in annual revenue, is the leader in Application Performance Infrastructure, delivering the most complete platform for the hybrid enterprise to ensure applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed, and performance issues can be proactively detected and resolved before impacting business performance. Riverbed enables hybrid enterprises to transform application performance into a competitive advantage by maximizing employee productivity and leveraging IT to create new forms of operational agility. Riverbed’s 25,000+ customers include 97% of both the Fortune 100 and the Forbes Global 100. Learn more at www.riverbed.com.
Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logo used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners.
Contacts:
MEDIA CONTACT
Lori
Bertelli, 415-486-7909
lori.bertelli@riverbed.com
or
INVESTOR
RELATIONS CONTACT
Shanye Hudson, 415-527-4709
shanye.hudson@riverbed.com
