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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.”

The Latest

A new study by the IBM Institute for Business Value reveals that enterprises are expected to significantly scale AI-enabled workflows, many driven by agentic AI, relying on them for improved decision making and automation. The AI Projects to Profits study revealed that respondents expect AI-enabled workflows to grow from 3% today to 25% by the end of 2025. With 70% of surveyed executives indicating that agentic AI is important to their organization's future, the research suggests that many organizations are actively encouraging experimentation ...

Respondents predict that agentic AI will play an increasingly prominent role in their interactions with technology vendors over the coming years and are positive about the benefits it will bring, according to The Race to an Agentic Future: How Agentic AI Will Transform Customer Experience, a report from Cisco ...

A new wave of tariffs, some exceeding 100%, is sending shockwaves across the technology industry. Enterprises are grappling with sudden, dramatic cost increases that threaten to disrupt carefully planned budgets, sourcing strategies, and deployment plans. For CIOs and CTOs, this isn't just an economic setback; it's a wake-up call. The era of predictable cloud pricing and stable global supply chains is over ...

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

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