Riverbed Acquires Network Monitoring, Reporting Help

WAN provider Riverbed Technology Jan. 20 said it has acquired Mazu Networks, a 7-year-old, privately held company that helps enterprises optimize the performance of global applications by providing detailed network monitoring and reporting services.

Mazu will immediately become a business unit of Riverbed. In addition to the acquisition of all of Mazu's outstanding securities, Riverbed will pay about $25 million in cash at closing, with an additional possible payment to be paid subsequently based on future sales performance.

Mazu Networks makes analytics and reporting software that provides a holistic, real-time view of application usage and performance, Riverbed executive Paul O'Farrell told eWEEK.

"This perspective is critical to understanding the application environment and taking the right steps to validate and ensure delivery of business-critical applications across the wide-area network," O'Farrell said.

The acquisition of Mazu Networks allows Riverbed to meet enterprise and service provider customer demands by extending its suite of WAN optimization products to include global application performance, reporting and analytics, O'Farrell said.

"The market for WAN optimization is fast becoming more mainstream, and increasingly our enterprise and service provider customers are demanding more visibility, reporting and analytics capabilities from us as they seek to deploy more robust infrastructure for managing their global applications," said Jerry M. Kennelly, president and CEO of Riverbed. "This requirement is driven by the enterprise's need to reduce costs via consolidation, improve end-user productivity and leverage technology to streamline business processes."

Since its inception in 2002, Riverbed has become a major IT infrastructure performance company that provides WAN optimization to a list of international customers.