Riverbed Technology, the SD-WAN company, today introduced the Riverbed Service Delivery Platform, designed to enable service providers to deliver Network-as-a-Service, with the speed and flexibility expected by today's digital enterprises. Current Network Function Virtualization (NFV) deployments have given service providers a limited ability to provision new services quickly and consolidate branch footprint, but have failed to deliver on the true agility that service providers require in order to improve customer satisfaction and grow their business. In many cases, NFV has perpetuated and magnified the existing challenges with physical appliances by introducing additional operational complexity.

The Riverbed Service Delivery Platform is designed to let service providers transform their existing NFV investments into a cloud-like Network-as-a-Service model by abstracting the complexity associated with NFV and focusing on services instead. With the Service Delivery Platform, service providers will be able to rapidly introduce new services, ensure those services are delivered as intended, give their customers the ability to scale services up and down on demand, and expand into new areas such as IoT and Edge Compute.

Some of the key benefits of the platform include:

• Seamless extension and integration of quality based MPLS services across all and any connectivity models to service provider customers with consistent policy, security and service visibility and assurance
• DevOps approach to rapid service design, on-boarding and deployment dramatically shortening time-to-market for new services
• Rapid elasticity and resource pooling enabling service providers to effectively support multi-tenancy while delivering a massively scalable and available services-based infrastructure to their customers
• Continuous service delivery optimization via closed-loop orchestration, ensuring that service levels are met while infrastructure is being utilized most effectively
• Improved customer intelligence and service assurance, enabling service providers to take on a more consultative role with their customers
• Maximized value from existing investment as the platform integrates seamlessly into a mixed hardware-virtualized environment to pave the way from traditional networking investments to 100% NFV/SDN environment
• Open and Standard-based, the platform allows for plug-and-play extensibility at each layer of the architecture, eliminating vendor lock-in

"Service providers are going through a massive transformation and are changing how they acquire, manage and deploy technologies so they can meet the needs of today's digital customer," said Phil Harris, GM, Service Provider Segment Vertical at Riverbed. "Riverbed's Service Delivery Platform allows service providers to re-invent their business and evolve their infrastructure. Now, service providers have the flexibility to roll out differentiated services and deliver them to end customers quickly and efficiently."

"We're seeing a significant shift in the strategies and actions of service providers, as they look to be more agile in rolling out new enterprise WAN and branch services faster, including emerging solutions such as SD-WAN." said Rohit Mehra, Research Vice President, Network Infrastructure, IDC. "Riverbed has been a long time partner with many leading service providers, and their advancements with this new Service Delivery Platform and technologies such as SteelConnect and SteelCentral, puts them in a strategic position with service providers as they look to evolve their offerings and roll out solutions to capture new revenue opportunities."

Riverbed has a long history of collaborating with the world's largest service providers - including previously announced service offerings with BT, Orange, Verizon and AT&T. Today's announcement furthers the opportunity for service providers to build out their service offering, with an even broader range of networking and cloud services and is a major investment and advancement for Riverbed's service provider program.

The Service Delivery Platform is planned for release in the second half of 2017.