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Vector Capital Completes Acquisition of Riverbed Technology and Names New CEO

Vector Capital announced the successful completion of its acquisition of Riverbed Technology.

In connection with the close of the transaction, Dave Donatelli has been named CEO, effective immediately. Dan Smoot, who previously served as CEO, will continue to support the Company on a transitional basis.

Donatelli previously served as the EVP of the Cloud Business Group at Oracle Corporation. Earlier, Donatelli served as EVP of the Enterprise Group at Hewlett-Packard leading the $30 billion division and overseeing storage, server, networking, and converged infrastructure solutions. He began his career at EMC Corporation, serving in multiple leadership roles, most recently as President of the EMC Storage Division. He most recently served as the lead independent director at MarkLogic, a leading data management and data integration solutions provider and Vector Capital portfolio company.

“Riverbed is a terrific business with a strong foundation for success. Its industry leading portfolios, Alluvio by Riverbed for Unified Observability and Riverbed Acceleration are market leaders with blue-chip customer bases,” said Donatelli. “Bolstered by a significantly improved capital structure, I look forward to working with Riverbed’s team and Vector Capital to enhance our product offerings through innovation and strategic growth investments.”

“Dave is a proven leader who brings to Riverbed deep knowledge and experience driving growth at scaled technology businesses,” said Andy Fishman, a Managing Director at Vector Capital. “He is a purposeful changemaker with a customer-first approach and is the ideal person to lead the company forward as it pursues continued growth and scale ... We would also like to thank Dan Smoot for his contributions to the company and his support navigating the transition, and wish him the very best in his future endeavors.”

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Vector Capital Completes Acquisition of Riverbed Technology and Names New CEO

Vector Capital announced the successful completion of its acquisition of Riverbed Technology.

In connection with the close of the transaction, Dave Donatelli has been named CEO, effective immediately. Dan Smoot, who previously served as CEO, will continue to support the Company on a transitional basis.

Donatelli previously served as the EVP of the Cloud Business Group at Oracle Corporation. Earlier, Donatelli served as EVP of the Enterprise Group at Hewlett-Packard leading the $30 billion division and overseeing storage, server, networking, and converged infrastructure solutions. He began his career at EMC Corporation, serving in multiple leadership roles, most recently as President of the EMC Storage Division. He most recently served as the lead independent director at MarkLogic, a leading data management and data integration solutions provider and Vector Capital portfolio company.

“Riverbed is a terrific business with a strong foundation for success. Its industry leading portfolios, Alluvio by Riverbed for Unified Observability and Riverbed Acceleration are market leaders with blue-chip customer bases,” said Donatelli. “Bolstered by a significantly improved capital structure, I look forward to working with Riverbed’s team and Vector Capital to enhance our product offerings through innovation and strategic growth investments.”

“Dave is a proven leader who brings to Riverbed deep knowledge and experience driving growth at scaled technology businesses,” said Andy Fishman, a Managing Director at Vector Capital. “He is a purposeful changemaker with a customer-first approach and is the ideal person to lead the company forward as it pursues continued growth and scale ... We would also like to thank Dan Smoot for his contributions to the company and his support navigating the transition, and wish him the very best in his future endeavors.”

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

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For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

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