Riverbed’s expanding product portfolio has prompted an expansion of the company’s partner programme.

Best known for its WAN optimisation offerings, recent times have seen Riverbed expand into application delivery, with its Stingray family of products; network performance management, with Cascade; Edge virtual server and cloud storage delivery with Whitewater. The expanded partner programme, launched earlier this year, features five technology authorisation paths built around the different platforms.

Joe McPhillips, Riverbed ANZ channel director, says “Consolidation, virtualisation and private and public cloud are challenges for customers and with partners having Riverbed in their portfolio we believe they habe the ability to take solutions to customers challenges by these issues and help drive down costs and improve performance.”

He says virtualisation still offers significant growth opportunity.

McPhillips says one of the ‘beauties’ of the expanded programme is that resellers can opt to go wide with Riverbed’s full offering of solutions, or they can pick off only the ones that really suit their business and take them to market.

He says partners will be rewarded for taking on training, particularly in the newer areas such as network performance management, application delivery and Edge virtual server, with additional rebates for sales of those solutions and new incentives.

Online, self-service training has been ramped up as the company pushes for resellers to up skill ‘on a daily basis’.

McPhillips, who was in New Zealand for the local series of the 60 city Performance Summit used to showcase the programme changes, says the new programme has been well received by partners. He says more than 2000 people have used the new online training globally.  However, he says it’s still too early to see any tangible returns.