Riverbed Technology announced the appointment of Ray Villeneuve as general manager of the cloud storage acceleration business unit. This newly formed business unit will focus on pursuing long-term growth initiatives for the Riverbed Whitewater storage gateway. As the General Manager, Villeneuve will have direct responsibility for all strategic and operational activities, including sales, product development, services, marketing and channel development, with an emphasis on activities aimed at growing worldwide sales.

"Ray brings with him a robust storage background, having worked as an executive at NetApp and Auspex, and having been CEO of several storage start-ups. His strong and successful management background shows a proven track record of being results-oriented, and most importantly customer-focused," said Jerry Kennelly, president and CEO at Riverbed. "Riverbed has always put the needs of our customers first, which has led to innovative product developments that directly address ever-changing IT requirements. We've laid a solid foundation for the Whitewater business and look forward to the contributions Ray will make to take this business unit to the next level."

Prior to joining Riverbed, Villeneuve held the CEO and President positions at several technology startups, including Liaise, a Silicon Valley company founded with the goal of helping people work faster, smarter and more easily with others by offering a business interaction management solution, and MonoSphere, the creator of an award-winning storage capacity management software application for enterprise data centers. Prior to this, Villeneuve was the vice president of marketing at NetApp, where he helped to create that company's growth strategy and execute worldwide enterprise account penetration.

The cloud storage acceleration business unit within Riverbed will focus on product development, marketing strategy, and go-to-market execution for the Whitewater gateway solution. With Whitewater, organizations have a fast, secure and cost-efficient solution to seamlessly move backup data offsite to public cloud storage environments. Whitewater connects directly to the industry's most popular backup/restore software tools as well as the leading cloud service provider application programming interfaces (APIs). It securely accelerates backup and recovery operations, deduplicates and compresses data to reduce storage costs in the cloud and installs quickly without requiring changes to the existing backup infrastructure. The broad ecosystem for Whitewater enables organizations to flexibly transition between major cloud storage providers, should requirements change.

"Riverbed has proven to be an innovation leader over the years. The introduction of the Whitewater storage gateway catapulted the company into a new market where optimizing data protection while maintaining high performance is essential," said Villeneuve. "I'm pleased to join a company with world-class product development and engineering teams that have delivered on a customer-driven roadmap, as well as executive leadership that has set the foundation for success as we execute initiatives to grow the business."

More than 13,000 organizations worldwide, across a wide range of markets, depend on Riverbed to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT infrastructure. Riverbed delivers hardware, software and virtualized solutions that overcome performance issues caused by distance, distributed computing, and ever increasing amounts of data. Virtualization, consolidation and cloud computing promise huge cost savings and improved efficiencies, but as users move farther from their data, slow applications and file transfers can stall these strategic initiatives. Riverbed delivers to the remote office and mobile workers the same "local area network (LAN)-like" performance, no matter where the private data center or public cloud may be. Riverbed continues building on its success in the wide area network (WAN) optimization, application-aware network performance management (NPM) and data protection markets with new and innovative solutions for accelerating cloud storage and access to applications and data deployed in public, private and hybrid clouds.

Forward Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed's products and services, statements regarding the expected growth of Riverbed's Whitewater business, and statements relating to Riverbed's ability to meet the needs of distributed organizations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed's business are set forth in our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on April 29, 2011. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Any future product, feature or related specification that may be referenced in this release are for information purposes only and are not commitments to deliver any technology or enhancement. Riverbed reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time.