William Hartwell leads the Federal Markets Division at Riverbed Technology and is responsible for driving the Company’s products and services for WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration into Federal Civilian Agencies, the Department of Defense, and the Intelligence Community. Prior to joining Riverbed, Hartwell was Vice President of Business and Channel Development of government markets at Motorola, where he developed teams to drive enterprise mobility solutions into the public sector markets. In addition, he was Vice President of the Federal Government area at Symbol Technologies prior to its acquisition by Motorola. Hartwell also spent eight years at Cisco Systems, where he developed senior sales, systems engineering, channels, and business development teams with extensive customer and industry knowledge across the Federal Markets.
MSM
Bill, you have a history in the government space, working at Motorola and Cisco Systems. What compelled you to join Riverbed Technology last year?
Bill Hartwell
There are a number of reasons why I joined Riverbed. First, the Company is the recognized leader in WAN Optimization with more than 5,500 customers around the world, plus a significant installed base of government customers in many countries. After working at larger organizations, it was compelling to join a small, growing company that has the market recognition Riverbed does.
We have a strong partner ecosystem with large VARs, system integrators, and service providers — many of whom are focused specifically on government customers. Riverbed is also investing to make certain that our products meet the needs of our Federal customers. Features such as SMB signing, encrypted exchange acceleration, SSL acceleration, data-at-rest encryption, and SCPS are very important to our government customers.
MSM
How are organizations today using WAN optimization solutions? How does the technology work?
Bill Hartwell
Riverbed provides Steelhead appliances, which are placed on either end of a WAN link. We also sell a software-only version of the technology (Steelhead Mobile) that sits on the laptops of mobile users. Customers use our technology to accelerate applications over the WAN, reduce bandwidth requirements, consolidate IT infrastructure, and improve disaster recovery processes.
It’s the combination of de-duplication, TCP optimization, and application-specific protocol optimization that makes the difference. And, of course, Riverbed accomplishes all with the simplest-to-deploy solutions, which means our systems can scale to the world’s largest deployments.
MSM
What are the benefits Riverbed is providing to military organizations? What are some examples?
Bill Hartwell
Customers are using our technology in a variety of ways. The U.S. Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances at 47 sites to enable consolidation of IT resources and reduce the number of data centers from 17 to two, while still providing LAN-like application performance for users.
Military customers can also accelerate applications to remote locations to give warfighters timely access to mission-critical information. One of the largest navies in the world uses Riverbed products to simplify communication between ships and their terrestrial-based support facilities for IP-based voice, video, and data collaboration. They use high-latency, low-bandwidth satellite links between their support facilities and ships all over the world. Using Riverbed Steelhead appliances, they have achieved “near-terrestrial” performance of key web applications on all of their ships and reduced bandwidth utilization by nearly 70 percent.
Increasingly, we are seeing SATCOM kit builders using Steelhead appliances, or mobile clients, in place of traditional TCP-PEP devices. The result is a higher performing solution that addresses more of the warfighters’ performance bottlenecks. Many times this approach also allows organizations to have a single WAN optimization solution across the enterprise networks instead of several difference solutions.
MSM
What will military organizations find unique about the Riverbed WAN optimization solution?
Bill Hartwell
Military organizations need to keep a small IT footprint at remote sites while providing warfighters LAN-like access to critical information from anywhere in the world.
To help address this, Riverbed recently enhanced its Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) offering with virtualization based on VMware. The RSP allows customers virtualization of essential third-party software modules onto Steelhead appliances, allowing further consolidation of their IT infrastructure at remote sites, and even greater ROI on their Steelhead appliance investment. The enhanced RSP is an enterprise-class platform that enables drastic reduction in the remote site footprint by running up to five virtual machines, without the need for separate dedicated servers. This approach will enable military organizations to improve asset use, reduce physical footprints, control IT costs, improve net-centric operations, and ultimately make the server-less remote site a reality.
MSM
Riverbed recently announced SCPS interoperability. How do military organizations benefit from deploying SCPS-enabled WAN optimization solutions?
Bill Hartwell
For military customers that depend on satellite WANs, Riverbed has partnered with Global Protocols, Inc. to integrate SkipWare®, the market-leading SCPS implementation, into Steelhead appliances. With Riverbed and SkipWare together, military customers can get the best of both worlds: the market leading acceleration capabilities of Steelhead appliances alongside best-of-breed SCPS functionality from SkipWare.
Military customers deploying the combined solution can achieve greater application performance benefits, and bandwidth reduction, across their satellite WAN, while maintaining SCPS interoperability. It also enables military organizations to optimize connectivity with any SkipWare-based military network and maintain full interoperability with any other SCPS-based network.
About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications, and storage. Riverbed provides the only comprehensive WAN optimization solution to a host of severe problems that have effectively prevented enterprises from sharing applications and data across wide areas. Riverbed’s Steelhead appliance address all of the issues that affect application performance over the WAN, dramatically improving the performance of applications that companies and knowledge workers rely on every day — including file sharing, email, backup, document management systems, IT tools, as well as ERP and CRM solutions. With Riverbed, any of these applications can be accelerated somewhere between 5 and 50, and even up to 100 times faster.
