Riverbed has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Xirrus, a leading provider of next-gen, cloud-enabled Wi-Fi networks. While this will surely expand the power of Riverbed’s own SD-WAN solution SteelConnect with an industry-leading Wi-Fi solution for Enterprises and Service Providers, I believe the bigger impact will be in setting a new bar for how distributed networks should be deployed and managed overall.
Networking is clearly moving away from configuring boxes and moving toward policy, orchestration and automation. SD-WAN is a great example of this transition, enabling an efficient and agile way to manage hybrid WAN circuits in remote locations.
