Riverbed introduced a series of powerful Microsoft product integrations, enabling mutual customers to leverage their Riverbed and Microsoft investments together to drive business results and maximize digital performance.

“Riverbed has a long-standing relationship with Microsoft and we remain committed to helping our mutual enterprise and government customers rethink possible in the digital era,” said Paul O’Farrell, SVP and GM, Cloud Infrastructure Business Unit at Riverbed. “With today’s product enhancements, our customers have more options to instantly capitalize on the benefits of their Microsoft investments, whether it be in the cloud with Microsoft Azure or at the edge with Microsoft Hyper-V. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Microsoft and together, helping customers drive innovation and stay ahead of the curve in today’s competitive IT landscape.”

Gavriella Schuster, CVP, One Commercial Partner at Microsoft added, "Microsoft has always been a partner-led organization and we value our strong relationship with Riverbed. These new product enhancements further demonstrate our ongoing collaboration. As we continue to evolve our mutual offerings to provide increased value with advanced solutions, we enable our mutual customers to push boundaries towards a digital-first business.”

Through Riverbed’s SD-WAN solution SteelConnect, customers will now be able to automate local branch path steering for Microsoft Office 365 via conventional Internet broadband. By using the SteelConnect Manager policy engine and intuitive graphical interface, users can extend software-defined policies for steering traffic for selected applications or digital services, users or entire locations. SteelConnect Manager can also be used to connect to Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN, a global network backbone for managed site-to-site and branch-to-Azure connectivity.

This announcement builds on Riverbed’s broader vision to enable unified connectivity and orchestration across the entire distributed network. Riverbed SteelConnect is the industry’s first and only SD-WAN product that provides unified connectivity and policy-based orchestration spanning the entire network – WAN LAN/WLAN, data center and the cloud, with one-click connectivity and optimization into Microsoft Azure. Earlier this year, Riverbed announced that SteelConnect supports Azure ExpressRoute with automated “single-click” connectivity. SteelConnect also enables zero-touch provisioning, allowing an enterprise to set-up a global network and connect to the cloud in minutes, and easy ongoing network management that provides the ability to make quick and easy network or business/application policy changes.

Riverbed SteelFusion is extending its offering for Microsoft Hyper-V customers, further expanding on its ability to provide enterprises with flexible and secure architectures, dramatically simplifying operations at the edge of the network. Enterprises and organizations who have selected Hyper-V as their hypervisor of choice will be able to leverage SteelFusion for distributed IT, and fully realize its software-defined value, with the flexibility and agility to instantly deploy and centrally manage edge services, data and applications to any number of remote branches and sites.

SteelFusion is an extensible services platform that uniquely converges an Intelligent Storage Cache, industry-leading WAN Optimization, and industry-standard virtualization into a streamlined and centrally-managed platform for edge IT. The solution replaces all traditional edge infrastructure and enables enterprises and organizations to modernize remote IT infrastructure and operations for the digital age, delivering unprecedented IT agility, data security and application performance while allowing the most data-sensitive organizations to meet compliance standards required for their industry. To date, enterprises and organizations across all industries have replaced older, more complex edge architectures with SteelFusion for a more modern approach to edge IT, including global law firm, Paul Hastings.