Riverbed Technology Inc. is upgrading several of its software products with new artificial intelligence features and other enhancements that will give enterprises deeper visibility into their networks.

The updates were announced today against the backdrop of the company’s Global Virtual User Conference. 

San Francisco-based Riverbed claims more than 30,000 customers, including 99 companies on the Fortune 100 list. It sells software that information technology teams use to boost the speed of their companies’ networks, monitor their health and look for suspicious activity.

The first of the products for which Riverbed announced updates today is its AppResponse platform. AppResponse enables IT teams to find performance issues such as pages on the corporate website that are loading slowly, or internal business applications experiencing high latency.

Riverbed has equipped the software with AI features that can measure the normal response times of an application and, using this information as a reference, automatically identify slowdowns impacting the user experience. The company claims its AI technology produces fewer false alerts than traditional problem detection mechanisms. The result, Riverbed claims, is that time administrators normally spend investigating low-priority alerts or those on which action can’t be taken can be invested elsewhere. 

Also new in AppResponse is expanded visibility of employees’ encrypted internet connections. Encrypted packets often can’t be decoded even by the company on whose network they travel, which makes it more difficult to find threats lurking in web traffic. However, it’s still possible to gain visibility into potential security issues by analyzing certain high-level properties of the scrambled traffic. 

The new AppResponse release implements this approach to gathering metrics about the security certificates and cryptographic technologies used by encrypted connections. This information allows the software to flag certain types of issues, such as if certain connection use an expired security certificate, that may require the IT team’s attention.

Besides AppResponse, Riverbed also announced updates for a number of other products today. Its NetProfiler monitoring platform now provides a more in-depth view of networking issues affecting business applications. Moreover, NetProfiler, along with Riverbed’s Flow Gateway and NetIM infrastructure monitoring products, is being made available on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure for the first time.

The later update is particularly significant from a go-to-market standpoint because enterprises have accelerated their cloud migrations over the last few quarters. By bringing more components of its product portfolio to AWS and Azure, Riverbed should be in a better position to support its customers. The updates will advance a broader strategic push currently being pursued by the company to open new cloud revenue streams and expand beyond the on-premises network appliances for which it was originally known.

Photo: Riverbed