Driven by a new era of compounding data and applications growth, Riverbed announced the launch of its new AI-powered intelligent network observability solutions, significantly enhancing network visibility for enterprise IT teams and enabling them to proactively identify and resolve problems in real-time before they escalate into business challenges.1 The new solutions will deliver even greater value for the Riverbed Platform, and build on strong market momentum –with Riverbed observability bookings growth of 92% year-over-year (YoY) in the first half of 2025. With this launch, Riverbed is ushering in a new era of intelligent network observability, shaped by the realities of increasing enterprise complexity and grounded in the emerging requirements of a seamless digital experience.
Supporting surging network traffic demands, Riverbed’s launch includes the rollout of the new Riverbed xx90 appliance series for its AppResponse, NetProfiler, and Flow Gateway network observability offerings, delivering up to 3x the performance of the previous generation systems at the same price. For organisations seeking to maximise their technology investments while optimising cost savings, customers can now consume these new intelligent network observability solutions through the Riverbed Flex Subscription offering. Flex Subscription allows IT teams todeploy Riverbed licenses anywhere on the network, including hardware, virtual, or cloud instances, without additional software costs. These new AI-powered network observability solutions mark Riverbed’s 3rd major product release this year.
“Our relentless pace of innovation continues to set the standard in our industry—and it’s only accelerating,” said Dave Donatelli, CEO of Riverbed. “With today’s launch, we’re unveiling our next-generation Riverbed xx90 systems, offering dramatically higher performance and efficiency, alongside significant software advancements in network performance monitoring and enterprise-wide observability—now packaged and integrated with Riverbed IQ for AI-driven insights. These new solutions respond directly to our customers’ priorities: streamlining tool sets, unifying and simplifying network management, and automating for efficiency. And, with the Riverbed Flex offer, customers gain even greater software licensing flexibility, investment protection and cost savings.”
The new Riverbed Intelligent Network Observability Essentials bundle is now available with the purchase of either AppResponse packet capture and analysis or NetProfiler enterprise-scale hybrid flow monitoring. Included in the Network Observability Essentials bundle is a comprehensive suite of tools designed to enable proactive and accelerated remediation across complex, hybrid network environments:
- Riverbed IQ: SaaS-based AI that pinpoints issues and speeds resolution – no extra infrastructure needed.
- Workspaces: Role-based dashboards that unify packet, flow, and endpoint insights to provide contextual visibility for every team.2
- Grafana plug-in: Seamless integration for organisations using Grafana to visualise Riverbed observability data in their existing dashboards.3
- Topology viewer: Dynamic, map-based visualisation that correlates network topology with application and user performance to speed triage.
The Essentials Bundle is available with Riverbed Flex, which delivers greater architectural freedom, license portability, value retention, and lower total cost of ownership. With Flex Licensing, customers can:
- Re-allocate licenses across hardware, virtual, or cloud deployment.
- Streamline budget planning with predictable OPEX-based pricing.
- Support future growth and transitions without needing to re-purchase software.
This licensing approach enables IT teams to align network observability investments with evolving business needs, whether optimising for resilience, performance, or AI-driven automation.
Built to scale: Performance without bottlenecks
Riverbed’s new xx90 appliance family are purpose-built to support the scale, speed, and precision required in today’s distributed enterprise networks. Whether deployed for AppResponse, NetProfiler, or Flow Gateway, the xx90 family delivers high-throughput performance for both packet and flow capture without compromise.
As part of the recent update, AppResponse 11.21 enables real-time triage of encrypted IPSec ESP tunnel traffic and cipher hygiene, even across globally distributed environments. AppResponse 11.21 on xx90 systems offers sustained packet capture over 50 Gbps, concurrent packet capture and analysis, and scalable modular storage exceeding 2.4 PB.
For flow-based monitoring and analytics, the same xx90 system powers the new 10.29 version of NetProfiler and Flow Gateway, delivering unmatched flow visibility and analysis at scale. With 3x faster reporting and analysis and 2x faster throughput, the new software also includes dynamic Flow Load Balancing and full support for Versa SD-WAN.
Together, these high-performance appliances boost performance for collecting the full-fidelity network data that serve as the backbone of Riverbed’s Intelligent Network Observability, enabling smarter, faster, and more scalable network operations across corporate networks.
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