(Source: MARKETWIRE)Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications and storage, today announced that it has been named a PilotHouse Award Top Provider by Nemertes Research. The PilotHouse Awards ascertain how well vendors are performing according to customers in 10 technology markets, including WAN optimization. At an awards ceremony on November 2, 2009, Riverbed(R) was named the Top Provider in the WAN optimization category by obtaining the best overall scores for superior customer service, technology and value.

The WAN optimization category includes vendors that provide appliances that help an enterprise WAN perform better through use of caching, compression, acceleration or traffic shaping. Winning vendors were determined based on the survey results of over 1,300 IT practitioners. Participants were asked to evaluate vendors in the categories of value, customer service and technology. Riverbed swept every ratings category -- customer service, technology and value, leading to the best overall score. According to Nemertes, Riverbed beat out alternative WAN optimization offerings from Blue Coat, Cisco, Citrix and Juniper Networks. This is the first year the WAN optimization category was added to the PilotHouse Awards.

Riverbed WAN optimization solutions enable organizations of all sizes to overcome a wide range of IT and private cloud infrastructure performance bottlenecks, including poor application performance, slow database backups and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites. By speeding the performance of applications between data centers, remote offices and mobile workers, in some cases by up to 100 times, the award-winning Riverbed Steelhead(R) 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.

According to the Nemertes PilotHouse Awards report, which was published in November 2009 by analyst John Burke, "Riverbed rises to the top in large part because of its technology, both the power of it and (equally important for many IT shops) for its reliability and simplicity. IT truly values technology that can install, turn on, and then ignore while they get on with making the most of benefits delivered.