Riverbed Technology introduced Riverbed SteelHead 9.1, delivering new capabilities that are designed to ensure cloud applications perform as expected and provide IT the visibility, optimization, and control to deliver applications over hybrid WANs (wide area networks) to maximize business performance and cost efficiency.
Wherever applications are delivered, wherever data resides, and wherever users work in today’s complex enterprise environments, SteelHead 9.1 allows IT teams to deliver applications over hybrid networks strategically and securely by leveraging low-cost, public Internet links for business critical workloads to maximize return on investment (ROI). In addition to this new direct-to-net capability, Riverbed has expanded Riverbed SteelHead SaaS optimization and flexibility with new universal SaaS licensing and performance optimization for Box, ServiceNow, SAP SuccessFactors, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, in addition to support for Salesforce and Microsoft Office 365, which SteelHead already provides.
The typical enterprise today is hybrid, doing business with a combination of on-premises, SaaS, and cloud-based applications and infrastructure. As more and more SaaS applications are introduced into the enterprise, IT must deliver them with the best balance of both cost and performance to support business objectives. While hybrid architectures and SaaS applications help organizations lower costs and reduce time to market, they also create management challenges for CIOs and IT teams as they attempt to deliver an optimal and consistent end-user experience. In the cloud era, however, overcoming latency, controlling network paths for performance, managing bandwidth and infrastructure costs, ensuring quality of service (QoS), and having network visibility have become increasingly difficult because there are even more applications with even more network connections that no longer fall within IT’s realm of control.
Riverbed SteelHead helps organizations address the challenges of the cloud by enhancing visibility, optimization, and control of today’s hybrid WANs to maximize application performance and employee productivity while minimizing costs and complexity. The latest updates allow IT to deliver the best end-user experience for all applications with secure optimization across all networks, including the public Internet.
“Cloud computing can have a stormy side and it’s application performance. As the leader in application performance for over 10 years, Riverbed navigates a clear path through that potential storm. SteelHead 9.1 offers the most complete solution to ensure all applications – whether running on-premises or in the cloud – perform as the business requires,” said Paul O’Farrell, SVP and GM, SteelHead and SteelFusion Product Groups at Riverbed. “Application performance can now align with business performance and SteelHead 9.1 brings even more security and flexibility so IT can take full advantage of the cloud and the public Internet like never before.”
With employees increasingly requiring access to the Internet for research, social media, file sharing and collaboration sites, Video on Demand (VoD) and even YouTube, SteelHead 9.1 extends IT’s control to the public Internet with new capabilities and benefits:
- Embedded web proxy enhances Internet performance. Riverbed delivers the most comprehensive solution to improve end-user experience and reduce traffic over direct-to-net connections. SteelHead 9.1 introduces a fully embedded, transparent HTTP(S) proxy with web-object caching for all Internet traffic. This saves bandwidth by preventing subsequent transfers of potentially large files, and, by terminating the request locally, eliminates connection set-up time, further improving application performance. These capabilities are especially beneficial for large video objects, which employees use more and more for training and town hall meetings.
- Universal SaaS optimization for scalability. With the SteelHead 9.1 release, SteelHead SaaS customers will gain new flexibility and productivity improvements at just $1.99 per user per month with universal licensing. Offered as a subscription, SteelHead SaaS accelerates the delivery of SaaS applications, providing up to 33 times faster application performance and 97% reduction in bandwidth. It offers the flexibility to get performance optimization for the applications that are most important to a business and to scale quickly, helping contain costs and improve business agility. New capabilities and benefits for SteelHead SaaS include:
-New universal license for all supported SaaS applications. With SteelHead 9.1, SteelHead SaaS is now offered as a single-subscription-per-user for all supported SaaS applications. Customers can instantly activate optimization for additional SaaS applications with just a click of a button within the management console, with nothing more to buy.
- Performance optimization for more SaaS applications. Enterprises leverage a number of different SaaS applications to keep their business operations running, but going from hosted applications to SaaS often comes with challenges to network capacity, application performance, and end user experience. In addition to the application-specific optimization, visibility, and control previously provided for Salesforce.com and support for Microsoft Office 365, SteelHead 9.1 now allows seamless activation for application optimization for Box, ServiceNow, SAP SuccessFactors, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM at no additional cost. SteelHead SaaS now brings even more proven performance improvements for these SaaS workflows.
Riverbed SteelHead 9.1 is now generally available. SteelHead SaaS with universal licensing is planned for release in early August 2015.
The Latest
In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...
Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ...
Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...
Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...
Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...
The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...
The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...
In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...
AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.