Summer of 2002 was special for Jerry M Kennelly. He co-founded the San Francisco-based Riverbed Technology along with Dr Steve McCanne. A company that was formed after a coffee date on a Saturday morning with McCanne at a Starbucks cafe was a big risk for both executives.

It required both Kennelly and McCanne to leave their cushy and well paying jobs. As Kennelly puts, "I made a business plan for the venture capitalists to look at while Steve developed codes that could be sold."

With a Bachelor's degree from Williams College and a Masters degree from the New York University Graduate School of Business Administration, Kennelly has spent 25 years in the IT industry. His work experience also boasts of companies like Sybase, Oracle, Hewlett Packard, and Hitachi Data Systems.

After working with two successful startups: Inktomi and Gain Technology, he was ready to launch a company on his own. Backed by solid revenue funding from Goldman Sachs, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and UV Partners, the company is ready to move to different markets.

Kennelly was on a visit to India, last fortnight, to launch the operations of Riverbed Technology (India) Ltd. Excerpts from an interview with Priyanka Joshi:

What will be Riverbed's outlook for India?

Our main clients are the multinational companies that demand a faster Wide Area Network. Our core focus would be delivering a product category that solves the problems of latency and bandwidth that plague applications over distributed networks.

And, this idea has worked well for the bigger players who have offices spread over a larger horizon. For example, a multinational company headquartered in US would prefer to cash upon its existing bandwidth by installing our WAN accelerators.

Our market is any company that has more than one office. Overcoming challenges of transmitting data cuts bandwidth costs, makes throughput faster and improves performance.

We have 350 customers and 160 employees and growing at industry rates. We already have 2,600 installations across 6 continents. For example, LG invested about $2 million and within four months they have reported a saving of $500,000 savings per month on bandwidth costs.

We already have half a dozen installations in India that were purchased by customers in the US and Europe.

Aren't you late to step into India with your product offerings?

You can say that we have done our homework before we decided to jump into the Indian market. We took time to understand the nuances of this market and the issues of the players.

India is a part of the global IT market and one cannot afford to ignore it. The domestic outsourcing business is enormous in here and so it was quite a rational move for us to establish a Riverbed Technology (India) Ltd.

We understand that the adoption process will be a little longer. We are banking on the thought that a SMB today would want to grow into a MNC tomorrow. And that requires solid investments in both software and hardware infrastructure.

Who would qualify as your customers in India?

We think we have a great market in India. We intend to sell all those multinationals in India who have operations in distant offshore locations. We also expect to market our products to local outsourcing companies, accounting firms, engineering companies, architecture firms, banks, government agencies and even law firms.

We will also include oil and gas majors, manufacturing community and of course the IT companies too. We are looking at horizontal expansion in India, so there would not be a particular sector/industry that we would start from.

We have already signed Wipro [Get Quote], Datacraft as our distributors. They, being system integrators, have an installed base and will take our products to customer end. We will not sell directly to our customers. We might lose some revenues by selling through third party vendors but that has been our approach worldwide. But look at the penetration that we get and the benefits outweigh the costs.

What are the benefits of having a WAN accelerator?

Our technology promises a strong ROI. It has been noticed that within 3-6 months of installations, the company can leverage its costs. It reduces the number of servers and computers that are originally used to monitor data transmissions in any organisations.

Existing vendors mostly deal with one aspect of the problem, like compressing WAN traffic, and forgetting about other equally important problems. It's like getting more from the existing bandwidth.

Electronically speaking, the travel time for data to reach from one end to another decreases. I would say that our USP is deploying a solution that can be installed in virtually any size company, anywhere in the world. Riverbed Steelhead appliances get deployed on each side of the WAN.

The Steelhead appliances provide the highest level of WAN performance at a lower cost, reducing WAN traffic by up to 95 per cent and accelerating applications by up to 100 times.

To put it simply, you make an investment one time and end up saving forever.

What businesses are you looking at in India and what are the investments that a company has to make to get a WAN accelerator?

Surprisingly, smaller businesses that have only four offices have been one of the first Indian customers. They realise that WAN accelerator technology cuts the costs of connecting to various offices.

This technology comes at a comparable price of a router, that would be approximately $5000-$10,000. Smaller companies who do not have lots of resources and detailed IT departments stand to benefit the most from this technology.

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