It’s no secret in the IT business that some of the technology in hardware and software that runs organizations isn’t completely made by the brand in front.
Vendors often licence software from third parties to expand capabilities. Sometimes they tout their partners, sometimes they keep it quiet.
On Tuesday of them, Riverbed Technology, acknowledged that for the past two years Kelowna, B.C.’s Vineyard Networks has been the power behind the Layer 7 deep packet inspection capabilities of its Steelhead WAN optimization appliances.
“For us it’s a big acknowledgement – a leader in the WAN op pace is talking publicly that a key part of their technology is coming from Vineyard,” said Jason Richards, Vineyard’s founder and CEO.
“This is a feather in our cap as we’re talking to Tier 1 vendors” about licencing Vineyard technology.
And it’s not the first OEM deal the company will announce this year, he promised.
In fact, OEM deals is what Vineyard is all about. The company Vineyard makes what it calls the Network Application Visibility Library (NAVL), an application classification engine, and Network Reporting Centre (NRC) performance reporting software for makers of core wired and wireless infrastructure for enterprises and service providers. That includes gateways, unified threat management appliances, wireless access points
Riverbed has been licencing a small portion of NAVL’s application analysis capabilities, Richards said. But, he added, that was significantly increased last week when Riverbed released the latest version of its operating system, RiOS 8.0.
Riverbed is now among the biggest OEM partners of Vineyard. Others include anti-virus software maker Sophos and Blue Coat Systems.
Privately-owned Vineyard has been internally funded, Richards said, with revenues in “high single digit millions.”