This week Riverbed Technology acquired two companies that supplement Riverbed?s already impressive technology and footprint in the WAN and application performance space:  Zeus and Aptimize.

These acquisitions highlight how the need for speed on the Web is increasing due to pressures from multiple mega-trends. Companies like Riverbed, Akamai and Cisco have known this for years, and they have so far taken an approach rooted in the more established technologies they help foster ? appliance based WAN acceleration, network latency reducing CDNs and similar technologies. However the mega-trends are exerting pressure in ways that these technologies are no longer sufficient to solve their client?s problems.  What are these mega-trends?

• Web as a sales and marketing channel ? Companies large and small must have a fast website to compete.  In 2011, the average website visitor begins to consider clicking away from a website that takes more than two or three seconds to load.  The best websites load in two seconds or less.  It?s well known that slow websites are bad.  Every millisecond counts.
• Cloud computing and the SaaS delivery model ? ISVs and established enterprise applications are rapidly being transformed and delivered as SaaS applications.  The reasons for which are widely understood, however achieving fast performance for applications across the web is a complex technical challenge. Software buyers are aware of this and are putting pressure on both new SaaS based solutions and existing apps transformed or delivered as SaaS to provide their users with a productive and fast user experience.  Slow Websites and Web applications greatly affect employee productivity.
• ?Instant On? and user expectations ? Broadband is now almost ubiquitous.  Flash memory based devices like the iPad or MacBook Air are setting user?s expectations that screens and applications in a Web browser should load quickly.  Delays create frustration, lost users and low satisfaction. Users (Consumers and Employees) expect an ?instant on? Web experience.

Riverbed’s acquisition of Zeus brings them closer to the new architectures and deployment models.  Riverbed?s acquisition of Aptimize enables Riverbed to establish a foothold on the Web server.  Both of these acquisitions help Riverbed maintain its application acceleration position in the enterprise space.

By contrast, Yottaa’s Web Performance Optimization services were built from the ground up as cloud services to help website and web application owners solve their Web performance issues. Yottaa?s Web Performance Optimization solutions do not require any appliances, code changes or software installs like the traditional approaches and Zeus. Based on a global cloud network with thousands of servers, Yottaa?s blend of over 100 front-end optimization techniques automate the complicated performance challenges due to the constantly evolving browsers, JavaScript, Ajax, latency and third party plugins. In a few clicks, Yottaa enables any website or web application to be dramatically faster.

We welcome Riverbed to the cloud and their focus on performance only helps to evangelize the opportunities to help companies win with speed.

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