Riverbed Technology has been "notably" successful in carving its own niche in the IT optimisation segment, reports IT-Director.com.

In analysis published by the news provider from Bloor Research practice leader for IT infrastructure management Peter Williams, Riverbed is singled out for mention as the market leader in the industry sector. Mr Williams quotes Riverbed's senior director of marketing and alliances for Europe, the Middle East and Africa as saying: "For networking, you need more bandwidth - with latency the secret throughput killer."

Riverbed already has a market-leading 6,000 customers and focuses its efforts on wide area network optimisation, including accelerating application delivery over distributed branch networks.

The Steelhead appliance is a core component in achieving this, with Riverbed reporting that existing customers have achieved bandwidth utilisation reductions of anywhere from 60 to 95 per cent.

As a result, many have been able to postpone plans to purchase additional bandwidth by allowing their existing transfer provisions to operate more effectively.