Riverbed Boosts APM Abilities With Opnet Acquisition

Opnet Technologies, a specialist in the application performance management (APM) market, gets snapped up by Riverbed Technology for a cool $1 billion.

Network performance specialist Riverbed Technology announced on Oct. 29 the acquisition of Opnet Technologies, a provider of solutions for application and network performance management, for $1 billion in cash and stock. The acquisition will enable Riverbed to extend its network performance management (NPM) business into the application performance management (APM) market, where Opnet specializes.

APM represents more than 70 percent of Opnet's product sales, and has been growing more than 30 percent per year for the last four years, according to a statement from Opnet Chairman and CEO Marc Cohen. Opnet will be combined with Riverbed's Cascade business unit. The transaction is expected to be accretive to Riverbed's 2013 earnings per share on a non-generally accepted accounting principles (non-GAAP) basis, according to a Riverbed release.

"The addition of Opnet establishes Riverbed as the clear leader in the high-growth and converging application and network performance management markets," Riverbed Chairman and CEO Jerry Kennelly said in a statement. "This acquisition also transforms Riverbed into a billion dollar revenue company."

In August, Opnet announced that it has been positioned by IT research firm Gartner in the "leaders" quadrant of its "Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring." The research firm evaluated 14 vendors in the report, and recognized eight in the "leaders" quadrant, based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute.

Opnet's High Definition APM approach emphasizes breadth and depth in monitoring, with analytics that detect patterns and pinpoint relevant information. Big data technology is also leveraged to analyze billions of transactions. Opnet's solutions are designed to accelerate problem resolution, enable problem prevention and improve the overall effectiveness of the IT organization.

"Riverbed and Opnet have natural synergies," Cohen said in a statement. "Riverbed's leadership in accelerating business technology, combined with Opnet's industry-leading suite of APM products, provides customers with a single solution for monitoring, troubleshooting and actually fixing the application and network performance problems challenging them today."

Last week, Riverbed announced updated capabilities within the Cascade 10.0 performance management solution, which now manages virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), server virtualization, and fully virtualized data centers using VXLAN software-defined networks (SDNs). The Cascade product family is now offered as a virtual portfolio ready for deployment by service providers as well as in public, private and hybrid clouds.

The updated Cascade Profiler Virtual Edition and Cascade Gateway Virtual Edition join the Cascade Shark Virtual Edition to create a virtualized NPM solution portfolio. Installed as a virtual machine (VM) on VMware vSphere, Cascade Profiler Virtual Edition is the centralized analysis and reporting console that integrates application and network data from Cascade Shark Virtual Edition and Cascade Gateway Virtual Edition to provide company-wide service-level monitoring.