(Editor's Note: This article refers to a video interview shot at Interop (News - Alert) 2010. To view TMCnet's entire library of videos from Interop and other industry shows, demonstrations and interviews in our in-house studio, visit our Video News <http://www.tmcnet.com/tmc/videos/>  home page.)

Recently at the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMCnet's CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) had a chance to sit down and talk with Riverbed's (News - Alert) Vice President of Product Marketing, Apurva Dave.

"There's a lot going on" with the company, Dave said, noting that "2009 was a pretty interesting year for everybody. WAN optimization had a particularly interesting year, and Riverbed grew 18 percent in 2009, despite the down economy. I'd like to say that it was our hard work, but I think that the core technology provided so much value, in terms of cost savings for people, that there was a reason for them to invest, even in a down economy."

He pointed out that the IDC (News - Alert)-measured return on investment for their products is under six months: "So that means within the year, people can put a little bit into a WAN optimization device, and save a lot of money in a few different areas."

As to the question of what's going on now, Dave said, "consolidation and cloud are happening. And people care about those things because they're ways to save money. So people are looking at WAN optimization as an opportunity to get the performance they need across the network, both bandwidth as well as application performance, so that they can consolidate servers back from the remote sites in their data centers."

Even more so, Dave explained, they can move operations out into a public cloud if they need to, "and still get the performance they need, back to their distributed users, who could be around the world, or near where that cloud happens to be."