Mazu Lives On

Last month Riverbed announced that it had acquired Mazu Networks for about $25M. Mazu was one of a small group of companies trying to productize functionality based around Network Behavior Analysis technology. For reasons that we won't go into here but which have to do with the difficulties of technologies seeking markets (rather than the other way around), Mazu tried hard for many years but could not find a "killer app" with sufficient demand. Riverbed plans to re-introduce the Mazu profiler as Riverbed Cascade™ to provide visibility into end-to-end application delivery dependencies and Network Behavior Analysis (NBA) to address management gaps. Who knows, maybe this formula will work and Network Behavior Analysis will prove to be a valuable addition to the Riverbed customer base. Riverbed, at least, has a bunch of really smart people, has a large installed base in the WAN market which has always been hungry for more network visibility and wants to broaden its product line. It will be interesting to watch.