Partner Spotlight: Alluvio by Riverbed and Gigamon Drive Enterprise Performance

Since its inception in 2002, Riverbed has helped the world’s largest organizations empower the digital experience and drive enterprise performance. With its industry-leading solution, Alluvio by Riverbed, Riverbed transforms data into actionable insights across the entire digital ecosystem.

We talked to Heidi Gabrielson, Director of Product Marketing at Riverbed Technology, to find out how Riverbed and Gigamon are working together to provide optimization and acceleration solutions that deliver an exceptional digital experience for users everywhere.

Gigamon: Who is Riverbed and what is the company’s history?

Heidi: Riverbed has helped the world’s largest organizations maximize the performance of their networks and applications so their IT investments can reach their full potential. The Alluvio by Riverbed portfolio provides a differentiated approach to unified observability –– unifying data, insights, and actions across IT so customers can deliver seamless, secure digital experiences.

Alluvio solutions are designed to capture full-fidelity data on every transaction across the digital ecosystem and will apply artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to provide actionable insights and intelligent automation so you can drive faster and more accurate resolution.

Gigamon: Describe your company culture. What makes you tick?

Heidi: We believe in creating a diverse and nurturing place where employees can thrive. Riverbed’s mission is to hire incredible people who support our purpose and live our values. We empower employees to do their best work and encourage the sharing of ideas to grow a company full of opportunity.

Gigamon: If you had to describe Gigamon with just one word, what would it be?

Heidi: Persistence.

Gigamon: How do Alluvio and Gigamon work together to solve your customers’ problems?

Heidi: Working together, Alluvio and Gigamon eliminate network blind spots and improve MTTR (mean time to repair) by accessing and analyzing a comprehensive set of on-premises and cloud network traffic and application traffic.

Gigamon: What are some of your market’s specifics, advantages, and challenges when it comes to network security and visibility/IoT?

Heidi: According to Riverbed’s Hybrid Work Global Survey, 75 percent of business decision-makers say their organizations struggle to glean actionable insights from data that is generated by their technology infrastructure. Furthermore, IT still relies on siloed tools to manage performance and user experience. As a result, IT teams are overwhelmed by massive amounts of disparate data and alerts from monitoring tools that provide little context or actionable insights.

With Alluvio Unified Observability, our customers can extract the value of data with actionable insights and intelligent automation for seamless, secure digital experience and business performance.

We unify data by capturing full-fidelity telemetry across the entire IT ecosystem, including data from Gigamon. We deliver context-rich, filtered, and prioritized insights that apply to all domains and environments, not just DevOps and SREs for cloud-native use cases. We also unify actions by replicating and automating the investigation and remediation workflows of IT experts, enabling all skill levels to solve problems fast.

Gigamon: Which Gigamon features stand out the most and make the product outstrip its competitors?

Heidi: The Gigamon Visibility and Analytics Fabric™ really stands out. To monitor East-West datacenter traffic, Gigamon taps virtual traffic and incorporates it into the platform for delivery to Riverbed cloud solutions, so that the traffic can be monitored and analyzed together.

Gigamon: Provide an anecdote that customers share when they talk about our joint solution.

Heidi: Riverbed and Gigamon share many customers. When they use our products together, they talk about various benefits, including protecting user experiences and minimizing the impact of downtime on business; improving network and application performance across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments; and reducing risks and mitigating exposure to security threats.

Gigamon: What is the most memorable moment associated with Gigamon as a partner?

Heidi: Riverbed and Gigamon held a joint online event in which we had a mentalist, Kevin Viner, entertain key customers from both organizations. He was fabulous –– everyone was flummoxed by how he was able to do what he did online. It was a great session for everyone. Best of all, it led to several deals and happy customers.

Gigamon: What are the wow moments associated with Gigamon?  

Heidi: Joint virtual events have been a big hit. We generated $4.5 million in pipeline and $2.4 million in closed deals from four events. The biggest “wow” was the virtual event mentioned above in January 2021, featuring Kevin Viner, who thrilled attendees with a masterful mix of mentalism, sleight-of-hand, and comedy.

Gigamon: What are some of the new challenges you see in the market that the partnership with Gigamon can solve?

Heidi: Gigamon helps us solve challenges related to increasing volume, variety, and velocity of data by providing rich access to data for the Alluvio Unified Observability platform. It solves the problem of overwhelming volumes of data and alerts by unifying data, insights, and actions for all IT.

Another challenge is around encrypted data inspection, including TLS 1.3. Gigamon provides Alluvio AppResponse visibility into encrypted traffic without burdening each individual device.

Gigamon: What are some of the positive business outcomes you’ve had as a Gigamon alliance partner?

Heidi: Our joint partners like the idea of being able to sell a solution: Gigamon and Alluvio by Riverbed. Together, the Gigamon Visibility and Analytics Fabric for intelligent traffic filtering and manipulation and the Alluvio Unified NPM platform deliver exceptional network performance and visibility that combine infrastructure, application, user experience, and network monitoring for a holistic view of visibility and security. It’s a one-two punch for network visibility.

Gigamon: What unique capabilities does this partnership bring to our joint business?

Heidi: Gigamon helps optimize Alluvio AppResponse performance and save its processing power for detailed application analysis and reporting by de-duplicating network traffic data and by load balancing traffic from high-bandwidth networks (up to 100 Gbps) across multiple Alluvio devices. It also reduces the number of ports consumed on Alluvio devices, and identifies and filters specific application traffic types to tune out noise and focus on high-value activities.

Gigamon: Who is the target audience for the joint solution and how do they benefit?

Heidi: The primary users of our solutions are NetOps/ITOps. SecOps is a complementary audience.

Gigamon: In what industries have we seen success?

Heidi: We have strengths in several markets, including government, finance and insurance, manufacturing, professional services, technology, and biotech and healthcare.