Riverbed Technology announced that it has acquired Aptimize Limited, a privately-owned company that is a market leader in web content optimization. The Aptimize organization, based in Wellington, New Zealand, will become the new Web Content Optimization product group, led by the former CEO of Aptimize, Ed Robinson. Riverbed also announced today the acquisition of Zeus Technology, a privately-owned company that delivers high-performance software-based load balancing and traffic management solutions for virtual and cloud environments. The acquisitions of the two companies will form the cornerstone of Riverbed's asymmetric optimization strategy.

Aptimize is a market leader in web content optimization, an innovative new technology area that allows customers to deliver both internal web applications, like SharePoint, and external web applications, like e-commerce websites, much faster. The Aptimize Website Accelerator eliminates massive inefficiencies in modern web applications by effectively transforming the content (javascript, cascading style sheets, images, etc.) in real time--instantly accelerating websites or intranets with a simple software installation on the Web server. No extra hardware, code or browser changes are needed. Organizations that deploy the Aptimize solution have accelerated performance up to 400%. The Aptimize solution is often deployed in tandem with wide area network (WAN) optimization controllers and application delivery controllers (ADCs) to enhance performance.

"Aptimize provides a new type of optimization that can be applied to all types of Web-based content," said Jerry Kennelly, president and CEO of Riverbed. "Much like our Steelhead solutions optimize the protocols that web pages move over, Aptimize optimizes the actual content of the page for the end user's device."

Aptimize goes beyond HTTP and TCP optimization and Web content optimization by transforming web content for faster delivery and a more responsive user experience. Aptimize's technology reorders, merges and resizes content according to who is viewing it and from where. The end result is the application is delivered more effectively--up to four times faster--regardless of the platform used.

"Web content optimization is a natural fit for the next evolution of performance optimization. With the addition of the Aptimize solutions, we can deliver even faster applications with lower bandwidth to new audiences. Aptimize will be a strong complement and a major differentiator for Riverbed's performance offerings," added Kennelly.

"Aptimize and Riverbed bring together the two powerful technologies for accelerating applications inside and outside the firewall," said Ed Robinson, CEO of Aptimize. "The coming together of these two companies will create a unique offering in the marketplace."

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 WAN optimization and network performance management (NPM) markets with new and innovative solutions for accelerating cloud storage and access to applications and data deployed in public, private and hybrid clouds.