As the dazzle of opportunities enabled by cloud access grows, the companies responsible for the plumbing of these infrastructural developments have their work cut out for them, not simply in answering the current needs of their customers, but in anticipating and developing for those of the future.

Paul Mountford, chief sales officer at Riverbed Technology, Inc., joined Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at the Riverbed Disrupt conference to give some insight into Riverbed’s operations and goals for the near future.

Building up

Mountford began by looking back to when he had originally joined Riverbed’s team. At the time, the goal was to take Riverbed private and to take some of the assets the company had and get some volume behind them. “The fact is, we built the company on the back of network optimization,” Mountford shared, and that focus has persisted in the company’s approach. Though now that cloud is on the rise, new challenges are emerging.

“The physics of distance is even more exaggerated by cloud and SaaS models,” Mountford acknowledged. But he also felt that “providing and giving customers choice” made these efforts toward improving the existing optimization to meet the new needs worth the investment.

Performance for customers

“Application performance is business performance,” Mountford said, adding that “the application performance has to be fantastic.”

While the tech companies often try to fit in some experimentation with their service delivery, to find ways of improving their own performance, Mountford cautioned against being too freehanded with implementation. “I think [customers] are sick and tired of this industry using them as beta testers for technology,” he stated.

And while he avoided taking business for granted, Mountford was optimistic about Riverbed’s future. “We’re not the only company [doing what we do], but I would say that we’re in a great position. …. We can go in brand-new, do what the customers want us to do, and … upsell [while we’re at it].”

Future moves

“A new platform puts a lot of new opportunities in front of [customers],” Mountford noted, touching on the positive aspects of such a change before moving on to address the marketplace worries, which may one day grow into outright dangers for some.

“I think a lot of partners are worried about the big players … who are getting commissions [for their cloud services],” Mountford said, anticipating that a number of these customers would eventually ask themselves whether the services of the intermediary companies were really needed, and suggesting that such companies would be well-advised to diversify their offerings before arriving at that point.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Riverbed Disrupt.

Photo by SiliconANGLE