Riverbed Equips Channel Partners with AI-Ready Infrastructure and Agile Acceleration Solutions

Channel Post MEA

21-05-2025

Ghassan Abou Rjeily, senior manager for Channel Sales and alliances—GCC at Riverbed, and Shaik Asif, Regional Sales Director, Acceleration, EMEA & APJ at Riverbed, highlight how the company empowers channel partners with AI-ready infrastructure and advanced Acceleration solutions, boosting performance and scalability while offering flexible licensing and regional GTM support.
How is Riverbed helping its channel partners adapt to the growing demand for AI-ready infrastructure, and how do the new Acceleration solutions contribute to this transformation?
Ghassan Abou Rjeily: AI, at its core, is about data – and when it comes to data, quality and speed win. Our new Acceleration solutions are designed precisely to help our partners and their customers keep pace with the growing demand for AI-ready infrastructure. The goal isn't just to move data faster, but to capture and process it with greater fidelity, ensuring that vital information is not missed. The better the data, the better the output from AI models, leading to sharper decisions and improved business outcomes.
Our partners recognise this. Many are actively evolving their own systems, from ERP to procurement, to incorporate AI and are taking these real-world experiences to their customers. They don't want to just pitch a product; they want to present a roadmap, a future-proof strategy, and they need infrastructure that will support that.
Our newly launched Acceleration solutions support this ambition by ensuring that enterprise and AI applications – many of which are generating massive volumes of data across clouds, data centres and the edge – can operate with the performance, agility and resilience required. For partners, it's a way to stay relevant, add value, and build long-term trust with customers navigating the AI shift.
In what ways do Riverbed's new Acceleration solutions enhance the ability of partners to deliver measurable value to enterprise customers, particularly in large-scale or complex environments?
Shaik Asif: In the age of AI and hyperscale environments, network congestion is more than an inconvenience – it's a critical business risk. Poor data flow can bottleneck operations and undermine even the best AI strategies. This is where our Acceleration solutions come into play.
These tools give partners the capability to build high-performance, scalable networks that support modern, data-intensive applications across increasingly complex IT environments. The portfolio is comprehensive – SteelHead for traditional optimisation, SteelHead Cloud for cloud-based workloads, SteelHead SaaS for application acceleration, and SteelHead Mobile for the remote workforce. In short, whatever the environment, Riverbed can support it.
Crucially, these solutions are platform-agnostic. Whether it's satellite links in remote operations, MPLS in legacy environments, or connectivity between cloud and branch offices, our acceleration technologies fit. And with the newly announced Riverbed Flex, we've added a mobility licensing model that eliminates the need to purchase new licences when upgrading hardware. It's a cost-efficient, low-friction approach that empowers partners to better serve enterprise customers while deepening their presence in complex accounts.
Can you elaborate on how Riverbed's Flex subscription model supports partners in building sustainable recurring revenue streams across hybrid deployment scenarios?
Ghassan Abou Rjeily: Flexibility is no longer a nice-to-have – it's a strategic necessity. Riverbed Flex is built with that mindset, offering customers a highly adaptable subscription model that aligns perfectly with today's hybrid deployment strategies.
The standout feature of Flex is its simplicity—it allows customers to transition licences between hardware, virtual, and cloud platforms. They can scale capacity up or down, upgrade devices without forfeiting licences, and pilot deployments without committing to massive upfront investments.
This is especially relevant in the MEA region, where organisations typically take a more agile, self-directed approach to transformation – often without external consultants. Here, progress tends to be incremental. Flex supports that evolution, allowing partners to guide customers through gradual adoption and expansion, all while preserving investment value.
For partners, this means more than just a one-off sale. It's an opportunity to build lasting relationships grounded in recurring revenue, mutual growth, and trusted advisory. The subscription model becomes a vehicle for long-term value creation.
How does license portability across hardware, virtual, and cloud platforms impact partner flexibility and competitiveness in today's evolving IT landscape?
Shaik Asif: License portability is often overlooked, yet it's one of the most powerful enablers of agility in today's hybrid world. With Riverbed Flex, partners are no longer tethered to a particular platform or forced into rigid procurement cycles.
Instead, they can seamlessly shift workloads across environments—from physical infrastructure to the cloud—without incurring the overhead of new licences. This not only simplifies IT operations but also offers a clear competitive edge. It allows partners to respond faster, deliver more flexible solutions, and help their customers future-proof their infrastructure without locking them in.
What unique opportunities do you see for Riverbed partners to drive growth in high-demand sectors such as AI, oil & gas, and financial services with your network performance and data synchronization solutions?
Ghassan Abou Rjeily: Oil & Gas and financial services represent two ends of a very demanding spectrum, and Riverbed's Acceleration technology is uniquely positioned to serve both. In Oil & Gas, we often deal with bandwidth constraints due to remote or satellite-based connectivity. In finance, every millisecond of latency can translate into a significant monetary impact.
What unites both is the need for fast, reliable, and optimised data delivery. Acceleration is fundamental in these cases – it allows organisations to operate effectively, even in challenging network environments. And if it works in such extremes, it's not difficult to see its relevance in the many industries that fall somewhere in between.
For partners, that breadth of applicability translates to a major growth opportunity. Whether it's AI, energy, financial services, or any data-driven industry, the demand for performance at scale is only increasing, and at Riverbed, our solutions are purpose-built to meet these needs.
What specific go-to-market (GTM) support and enablement resources are available for channel partners in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region?
Shaik Asif: Success in the MEA region requires local nuance as much as it does global scale. Our partner enablement strategy recognises and addresses this.
We offer easy access to educational resources that enhance both technical expertise and commercial acumen. But we also go further. Our solutions are available on AWS and Azure marketplaces – which significantly speeds up procurement and simplifies deployment for both partners and customers.
We also understand the value of localisation. For example, in regions like North Africa, where French is widely spoken, we're developing sales enablement content in French, leveraging our teams in France. Similarly, we're producing Arabic materials for our Middle Eastern partners. It's a targeted approach, grounded in understanding the real-world context our partners operate in.
How is Riverbed incentivizing its channel ecosystem in MEA to accelerate deal velocity, improve sales performance, and deepen strategic customer relationships?
Ghassan Abou Rjeily: We take a focused approach to partnership. Rather than spreading ourselves thin across a vast ecosystem, we're working closely with a select group of partners who are committed to going deep with our portfolio.
To support this, we offer robust deal registration and protection. If a partner brings an opportunity to the table, they know their margin is safe. That clarity and assurance are critical in enabling partners to invest confidently in the sales cycle.
Ultimately, our incentive strategy is designed to foster trust, encourage long-term collaboration, and help our partners not just win deals – but build enduring customer relationships based on strategic value. 0 0