Riverbed made far-away offices feel close. Its Steelhead appliances sat at each end of a company's wide area network and cut the data crossing it. Files and applications opened quickly in branch offices. In 2006 companies were pulling servers back into central data centers to save money. Slow links to remote offices had become a daily complaint, and Riverbed's customers ranged from law firms to global manufacturers.

Smarter Software Over Bandwidth

Jerry Kennelly and Steve McCanne founded Riverbed in 2002. McCanne was a computer scientist known for research on internet video. Their bet was that smarter software could fix slow networks without more bandwidth. Riverbed combined data deduplication and protocol tricks in a box that was easy to install. Customers often saw results in days, which made the boxes an easy sale, and revenue grew quickly.

Thoma Bravo and a Restructuring

Riverbed priced its IPO at $9.75 a share in September 2006 on the Nasdaq and soon traded well above it. It led the WAN optimization market for years. As applications moved to the cloud, growth slowed. In 2015 Thoma Bravo took Riverbed private for about $3.6 billion. It went through a debt restructuring in 2021, and it still sells network performance tools.

Cover: Mountain Brook, Albert Bierstadt. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a mountain brook (a riverbed).