Riverbed CEO Builds Top Team
May 21, 2010
After Riverbed Technology achieved its first $100 million quarter, the company stock took a brief dive in late September as analysts questioned the strength of both its government and large private enterprise pipelines.
Riverbed co-founder, president and CEO Jerry Kennelly reacted good naturedly, saying Wall Street just wanted to see more of a track record.
Riverbed — which sells equipment that speeds up applications over business communications networks — went on to deliver two quarters with revenue over $112 million, with the first quarter of 2010 up 27 percent from the same period in 2009. Profits remain a challenge, with net income for fourth and first quarters at $780,000 and $1.08 million, respectively.
But the San Francisco company’s stock has resumed its rise. It’s now around $30, up roughly 73 percent over the last 12 months.
Joe Skorupa, research vice president for data center transformation at Gartner Group, credited much of Riverbed’s success to Kennelly surrounding himself with an exceptionally strong executive team.
One notable addition of late was Edward Chapman as vice president of cloud storage acceleration products. Chapman spent 15 years at Riverbed rival Cisco Systems, most recently as vice president of product management, where he was responsible for leading the data center switching and storage strategy within the server access and virtualization business unit.
Kennelly has also personally sought relentlessly to improve the services Riverbed provides, which owe much to the technical achievements of Kennelly’s co-founder and chief technical officer Steve McCanne, Skorupa said.
Riverbed has positioned itself to take advantage of cloud computing, and has won the loyalty of high-profile customers, even stalwart partners of Riverbed competitor Cisco Systems, such as AT&T, Verizon, British Telecom and France Telecom-Orange, Skorupa said.
Kennelly was previously chief financial officer at Inktomi (now part of Yahoo). He left that job to co-found Riverbed in 2002 with McCanne, then became CTO of Inktomi.
Riverbed Technology Facts:
HQ: San Francisco.
Employees: 1,068.
What it does: Sells equipment that speeds up applications over business communications networks.
Co-founders: Chairman and CEO Jerry Kennelly and CTO Steve McCanne.
Founded: 2002.
Funding raised: IPO in 2006, market cap $2.1 billion.
2009 revenue: $394 million.
Growth: First quarter revenue was up 27 percent over same time last year.