Riverbed Technology announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Aternity.
The acquisition of the privately-held company will expand Riverbed’s SteelCentral performance monitoring solutions with a best-in-class end user experience offering, and provide Riverbed customers and partners with the industry’s best and most comprehensive end-to-end visibility solution– spanning network, application and end user experience performance management.
“Aternity is another exciting and strategic acquisition for Riverbed. Their innovative end user experience monitoring offering perfectly complements and extends our SteelCentral solutions,” said Jerry M. Kennelly, Riverbed Chairman and CEO. “With the increased use of mobile devices, virtual desktop environments and the cloud, the ability to manage end user experience has become more important and complex for IT organizations. With this acquisition, Riverbed and our partners are now uniquely positioned to provide CIOs and businesses with a complete view across networks, applications and end users, all in one solution.”
Aternity’s proven technology helps enterprises see the entire user experience for any application running on any device, providing a user-centric, application performance experience vantage point that many of the market’s narrow-scope network or application performance monitoring tools lack. By effectively transforming every device – physical, virtual and mobile – into a self-monitoring platform that is user experience aware, enterprises are empowered with user-centric, proactive IT management capabilities that dramatically reduce business disruptions and increase workforce productivity.
This level of insight is increasingly important as enterprises rely on a mix of public and private clouds to gain operational agility, speed up application deployment, and achieve cost savings. The result is a hybrid IT environment in which applications and data are spread across heterogeneous operating systems, multiple data centers and cloud environments such as Microsoft Azure and AWS.
“Enterprises are accelerating their adoption of Hybrid IT environments to improve agility and control infrastructure costs,” said Mike Sargent, SVP and GM of the Riverbed SteelCentral Business Unit. “By capturing and analyzing how applications and devices perform from the end user’s perspective, Aternity offers enterprises the ability to proactively manage these increasingly complex IT environments to drive greater workforce productivity – and this critical capability combined with the power of SteelCentral will arm them with the most powerful and complete performance monitoring solution in the industry.”
An early pioneer in end user experience monitoring, Aternity today monitors more than 1.7 million mobile, virtual and desktop workforce endpoints. Device-based monitoring is important for ‘true’ end-user experience, especially as applications continue to fragment where/how they run and as users fragment where/how they access applications. Riverbed’s acquisition of Aternity will deliver to customers industry-leading end user experience and device-based monitoring and visibility across all mobile, virtual and desktop devices, and into all applications including cloud/SaaS applications. Riverbed plans to offer Aternity solutions through its robust partner ecosystem.
Mary Johnston Turner, IDC Research Vice President, Enterprise Systems Management Software, said, “The acquisition of Aternity is a great fit for Riverbed. By adding end user experience, end user device and workplace productivity monitoring to Riverbed’s existing network and browser based SteelCentral APM toolkit, Riverbed will be much better positioned to help customers deploy and manage applications and infrastructure to support today’s highly mobile, digital, online business strategies.”
The news continues Riverbed’s SteelCentral momentum, which recently included significant enhancements in cloud-based performance monitoring, along with new capabilities to help accelerate business execution and boost productivity.
The acquisition also follows Riverbed’s acquisition of leading SD-WAN provider Ocedo in January 2016, which enabled Riverbed to get to market faster with application-defined SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) solution SteelConnect in April. Additionally, Riverbed offers a comprehensive Application Performance Platform that delivers end-to-end visibility, optimization and control.
The acquisition of Aternity is expected to close in August 2016. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
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.