Venugopal Pai, senior director, Alliances, Riverbed talks to Biztech2 about Riverbed’s latest offering, Steelhead Mobile - the software client version of its Steelhead range of Wide-area Data Services (WDS) products.

What kind of investments would enterprises need to make in order to deploy Steelhead Mobile?

In order to deploy Steelhead Mobile, companies will require two components - a central management hardware appliance called the Steelhead Mobile Controller that manages Steelhead Mobile file caching and license pooling and a Steelhead appliance.

Each mobile controller provides 2000 concurrent licenses that gives the flexibility. The result of our beta testing has shown that on an average enterprises need one license per five mobile users and typically the average cost would be $100 per user.

What are the steps involved in the deployment process?

Simplicity is one of the key factors why people have deployed Riverbed appliances. The deployment requires only a few steps. With the mobility controller, once an IT administrator has decided which users are going to be the recipients of the client software, he can push the client over-the-air, non-disruptively. Most administrators would prefer to use the invisible mode to make the process as transparent as possible. They can push the software along with their next software/firmware upgrade and that’s all it takes.

Could an enterprise optimise WAN traffic for a specific application like an ERP or CRM?

It depends on what protocol the application uses. Considering that the newer deployments are mostly browser-based, the HTTP optimisation starts deriving a lot of performance benefits for them.

Many older application models such as SAP which run on proprietary protocols may not see a huge performance increase. However, you would still see a lot of data reduction on the WAN and optimisation of traffic in general, but not specific to the application.

Once enterprises move to the new breed of browser based CRM or ERP solutions, which inherently use the HTTP protocol, they will see huge performance benefits.

Can it be deployed across form factors other than a laptop?

Steelhead Mobile is based on a Windows platform, so it gives us the flexibility to port this software to a variety of different form factors. I’m sure that we’re going to see more devices added in the future, but nothing that we can announce immediately.

What kind of RoI can CIOs expect post deployment?

RoI depends entirely on the type of applications deployed in the enterprise. We have an innovative initiative which allows enterprises to “Try-and-Buy” this product. You can try the new technology, compare it with your requirements and then take the decision whether to buy it or not. As the optimisation is protocol specific, performance benefits experienced by each application will be different.

In fact we also provide an ROI tool that our channel partners can use. This tool takes into account all the details of the enterprise environment and demonstrates the applicable RoI. Thus, the combination of this ROI measurement tool along with the “Try-and-Buy” strategy enables the customer to identify the actual benefits.

For instance, a 2 MB link from India to the US costs $72,000 a year. If the use of Steelhead Mobile reduces a company’s bandwidth requirement to a 1 MB link, that translates into an annual saving of $36,000 and cost recovery in just 2 months.

More than bandwidth optimisation or ROI considerations, the parameter that enterprises are looking at is extending improved application performance to their mobile workforce.

What sort of opportunities does the Indian market offer for WDS services?

Well, emerging markets such as India present tremendous opportunities for our products. Estimates suggest that globally there is a 75% increase in the number of mobile workers on an annual basis. This percentage is even higher in case of geographies such as India. The use of this product is not limited to just branch or remote offices but extends to every mobile user. Thus, we can now extend the performance benefits of Riverbed products to the mobile workforce.