Riverbed’s observability platform gets a full refresh

With artificial intelligence tools proliferating across the enterprise world, observability is a more critical sphere than ever before.

Riverbed Technology LLC, which focuses on unified observability, has positioned itself as a centralized platform for managing autonomous operations. The corporate draws on years of experience in data collection and machine learning to deliver a comprehensive suite of AI and observability tools to its customers.

“At Riverbed … we put the inspiration for this stuff in,” said Dave Donatelli (pictured), chief executive officer of Riverbed. “We’ve been talking about it for the last several years, and this yr is the following iteration of it, delivering real value to customers and, for the primary time, really moving to autonomy so machines are literally fixing problems for people before they occur.”

Donatelli spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Riverbed’s recent releases and the way the role of observability is changing within the AI era. (* Disclosure below.)

Observability is the important thing to automation

When Donatelli was brought into Riverbed three years ago, he knew the info store could be critical for AI and his goal was to operationalize that. Riverbed’s newly updated platform is the result. It combines information across multiple domains — application, networking and device management, connecting environments that will otherwise be siloed from each other.

“What the info store can do is collect all that data right into a centralized place,” Donatelli said. “It’s an open architecture, so it collects our data and data from all other third-party apps on the market. Once you possibly can aggregate that data and organize that data, then it gets very easy to use all the assorted AI algorithms to it to get to automation. That is the premier approach to collect data within the observability space.”

Every Riverbed product has been refreshed, including Digital Experience and AIOps, Acceleration, Network Observability and APM. Now one software agent can manage all of those areas on top of the underlying store, which Riverbed markets as 360 Digital. The vision is a frictionless observability framework that paves the way in which for further autonomous operations.

“Aggregation is the important thing,” Donatelli said. “Do away with the silos, do away with the handoffs and make it simpler to truly operate. It’s an enormous deal. We’re lucky, because now we have all those fundamental technologies and we’re very deep in them, and it is advisable be deep in them to essentially get the true, accurate answers.”

Delivering value is paramount

Riverbed recently introduced its AI Assurance suite that covers three major features of running an AI-powered enterprise: using AI to jot down more automations, managing AI costs and implementing observability for AI agents. The corporate also released the 4.0 version of Riverbed IQ, an intelligence layer that manages governed, contextualized agents across organizations.

“We’ve added intelligence to the way you access the info that’s there,” Donatelli said. “By adding a natural language interface, you possibly can just discuss with it in the way in which you wish. In case you work on a service desk all day, you most likely work with ServiceNow, for example. You may access it [the data] through ServiceNow. In case you’re like me, I spend a whole lot of my day on Teams — I can access the info through Teams.”

Riverbed doesn’t shirk its duty in relation to delivering value to customers, Donatelli explained. The corporate gives its customers a return on investment metric for a way much money they save using Riverbed’s platform. Riverbed even has what it terms a “10,000-a-month club” — which translates to 10,000 instances of AI in practice, increasing efficiency.

“The subsequent thing on the horizon is getting people to the purpose where we are able to prevent problems before they occur,” Donatelli added. “We give people a greater experience, and your success rate of autonomy continues to rise. That’ll keep us pretty busy this yr. Customers are using these things in the true world at increasing rates on a regular basis, and it’s giving users a greater experience.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Dave Donatelli:

(* Disclosure: Riverbed Technology LLC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Riverbed nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE