With artificial intelligence tools proliferating across the enterprise world, observability is a more critical sphere than ever before.

Riverbed Technology LLC, which specializes in unified observability, has positioned itself as a centralized platform for managing autonomous operations. The company draws on years of experience in data collection and machine learning to deliver a comprehensive suite of AI and observability tools to its customers.

“At Riverbed … we put the foundation for these things in,” said Dave Donatelli (pictured), chief executive officer of Riverbed. “We’ve been talking about it for the last several years, and this year is the next iteration of it, delivering real value to customers and, for the first time, really moving to autonomy so machines are actually fixing problems for people before they occur.”

Donatelli spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Riverbed’s recent releases and how the role of observability is changing in the AI era. (* Disclosure below.)

Observability is the key to automation

When Donatelli was brought into Riverbed three years ago, he knew the data store would be critical for AI and his goal was to operationalize that. Riverbed’s newly updated platform is the result. It combines information across multiple domains — application, networking and device management, connecting environments that would otherwise be siloed from one another.

“What the data store can do is collect all that data into a centralized place,” Donatelli said. “It’s an open architecture, so it collects our data and data from all other third-party apps out there. Once you can aggregate that data and organize that data, then it gets very easy to apply all the various AI algorithms to it to get to automation. This is the premier way to collect data in the observability space.”

Every Riverbed product has been refreshed, including Digital Experience and AIOps, Acceleration, Network Observability and APM. Now one software agent can manage all of those areas on top of the underlying store, which Riverbed markets as 360 Digital. The vision is a frictionless observability framework that paves the way for further autonomous operations.

“Aggregation is the key,” Donatelli said. “Get rid of the silos, get rid of the handoffs and make it simpler to actually operate. It’s a big deal. We’re lucky, because we have all those fundamental technologies and we’re very deep in them, and you need to be deep in them to really get the true, accurate answers.”

Delivering value is paramount

Riverbed recently introduced its AI Assurance suite that covers three major aspects of running an AI-powered enterprise: using AI to write more automations, managing AI costs and implementing observability for AI agents. The company also released the 4.0 version of Riverbed IQ, an intelligence layer that manages governed, contextualized agents across organizations.

“We’ve added intelligence to how you access the data that’s there,” Donatelli said. “By adding a natural language interface, you can just talk to it in the way you want. If you work on a service desk all day, you probably work with ServiceNow, as an example. You can access it [the data] through ServiceNow. If you’re like me, I spend a lot of my day on Teams — I can access the data through Teams.”

Riverbed doesn’t shirk its duty when it comes to delivering value to customers, Donatelli explained. The company gives its customers a return on investment metric for how much money they save using Riverbed’s platform. Riverbed even has what it terms a “10,000-a-month club” — which translates to 10,000 instances of AI in practice, increasing efficiency.

“The next thing on the horizon is getting people to the point where we can prevent problems before they occur,” Donatelli added. “We give people a better experience, and your success rate of autonomy continues to rise. That’ll keep us pretty busy this year. Customers are using this stuff in the real world at increasing rates all the time, and it’s giving users a better experience.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Dave Donatelli:

(* Disclosure: Riverbed Technology LLC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Riverbed nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE