Riverbed Technology, Inc. is an American company founded in 2002 with the goal of reducing the latency and bandwidth constraints in delivering applications via wide area networks to multiple locations across long distances. Riverbed is known primarily for pioneering WAN Optimization with Riverbed SteelHead, which first shipped in 2004 and continues to lead the market with over 50% market share. As information technology has evolved over the past decade and begun to move to the cloud, Riverbed has also evolved: Businesses increasingly rely on applications and data that run both in on-premises data centers as well as in the cloud, delivered to users over a mix of private networks and public networks. This is the hybrid enterprise, and Riverbed offers a platform to give enterprises visibility to deliver, control, and optimize IT resources across this hybrid enterprise.
VMware, Inc. is a US software company that provides cloud and virtualization software and services, VMware's desktop software runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, while its enterprise software hypervisors for servers, VMware ESX and VMware ESXi, are bare-metal hypervisors that run directly on server hardware without requiring an additional underlying operating system. In 1998, VMware was founded by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Edward Wang and Edouard Bugnion. Greene and Rosenblum, who are married, first met while at the University of California, Berkeley.