Often new companies bring solutions for problems which yet have to be found. Riverbed -- a company that develops software that improves the performance of distributed systems is very much different. Riverbed just received $10 million in Series B.


Riverbed tackles one of the most disturbing problems that the 'distributed enterprise' is facing. Many employees/ partners are not in or close to a head office LAN. Instead they you use a WAN and VPN connections to connect from distant locations. Users are expecting the same behavior of their applications and naturally the same response times. Although many broadband connections are available now, there are still bottleneck and long response times. Combine it with decent network security it's a big headache for most CIOs.


Riverbed claims to have tool that transparently improves the speed of usage:

• Transparent. Unlike caching, Steelhead Appliances
  don't require any sort of client configuration, proxying,
  or other onerous processes. Furthermore, they do not interfere
  with ACLs, VPNs, QoS, file systems or any other business
  system you currently use.



• Broadly Applicable. All TCP traffic is optimized
  for bandwidth, giving you higher performance and saving
  bandwidth.


• Easy. Maintenance-free appliance requires virtually
  no configuration.
  


• Simple. No client-side or server-side software
  and auto-discovery mean that Steelhead appliances can
  be set up in minutes.


• Reduces Effects of High Latency. Latency optimization
  for key applications and protocols multiplies the benefit
  of the bandwidth optimizations.
  


• Expandable. Additional protocol and application
  accelerators available soon (over-the-wire upgrade and
  rollback for easy addition of new features).
  

If it really works, I'll buy... :-)