Riverbed has unveiled a significant expansion to its AIOps platform, incorporating predictive, generative, and agentic AI. Could you elaborate on how these advancements address the specific IT challenges faced by organizations in the GCC region?
Absolutely. In a region like the GCC, where digital transformation is progressing at breakneck speed, IT teams are under immense pressure to deliver seamless, secure, and resilient digital experiences—often with limited resources. This is where our expanded AIOps platform becomes a game-changer.
By embedding predictive, generative, and agentic AI into our observability suite, we’re helping organisations in the GCC shift from firefighting issues to preventing them altogether.
Let’s take predictive AI. It analyses both historical and real-time data to forecast potential problems—be it network bottlenecks, cloud resource strain, or application performance dips. Imagine a major bank in Riyadh being able to anticipate and avert a customer-facing outage during peak trading hours. That’s the kind of proactive capability this unlocks.
Generative AI, through Riverbed IQ Assist, brings natural language diagnostics into play. It provides contextual insights and guided remediation in environments where hybrid infrastructure can make root-cause analysis complex and time-consuming. Rather than trawling through dashboards, IT staff can get to the heart of an issue—like misconfigured cloud permissions or a sluggish app API—in minutes, not hours.
Then there’s agentic AI, which moves us from insight to action. Think of it as having an AI-powered assistant that not only spots the problem and recommends a fix, but carries out the resolution itself—like restarting a stalled business-critical service or scaling cloud instances ahead of demand spikes.
With over 64 million AI-powered remediations performed annually, Riverbed is already reducing operational overheads for customers around the world. In the GCC, this means IT teams can focus less on putting out fires and more on strategic projects that align with national visions for digital innovation.
The new platform introduces features like Riverbed IQ Assist and Smart OTel. How do these tools enhance observability and operational efficiency for enterprises operating in the Middle East?
The businesses we speak to in the region face some distinct operational challenges—ranging from limited access to skilled IT talent to increasingly complex hybrid environments. Our IQ Assist and Smart OTel solutions tackle these issues head-on by combining AI-driven intelligence with open, scalable observability tools.
Let’s start with IQ Assist. It dramatically reduces the time and expertise required to diagnose and resolve issues. By providing contextual diagnostics and remediation steps in natural language, it allows even junior IT staff to handle problems that would typically escalate to Level 2 or 3 support. That’s a big win in a region where IT resources are stretched thin.
What’s more, IQ Assist brings predictive and preventative maintenance into play. Rather than reacting to disruptions, it flags issues like impending storage shortfalls or bandwidth congestion before they cause downtime—offering recommended actions to address them early.
Then there’s Smart OTel, short for Smart OpenTelemetry. This tackles one of the biggest pain points in modern observability: data overload. It filters and curates telemetry data so IT teams get fewer false alarms and clearer signals. Crucially, it’s OTLP-compliant, so it plugs seamlessly into widely used tools like Grafana, preserving existing investments.
Together, these tools deliver faster resolution times, improving employee experience and reducing business disruption; more intelligent automation, helping IT teams focus on strategic work; and improved visibility across hybrid environments, including public and private cloud infrastructure. Importantly for the Middle East, these tools help bridge the digital skills gap, empowering teams to maintain high service levels without needing large, highly specialised teams.
Are there particular industries or sectors within the GCC where you foresee the most significant impact or adoption of Riverbed’s enhanced AIOps platform?
Our success in the region is rooted in the fact that our platform offers value across virtually every industry. That said, several sectors in the GCC are especially well-positioned to benefit due to their digital maturity, operational complexity, or strategic importance to national economies.
Finance and Banking, where we have a large, established customer base, comes first to mind. Here, customer experience is everything, and any latency or disruption can erode trust. Riverbed enables real-time insights and rapid issue resolution across increasingly complex, multi-cloud environments that power today’s financial services.
We also see strong resonance within Public Sector and Government as these are rapidly digitalising in line with national strategies like Saudi Vision 2030 and the UAE’s Digital Government vision. These bodies must maintain high service availability with constrained resources, making our automation and predictive tools particularly valuable.
Oil and Gas is another particularly relevant sector. With sprawling operations often in remote areas, performance issues can have huge financial and safety implications. Riverbed’s AI capabilities—especially predictive and agentic AI—help pre-empt issues and maintain uptime in critical infrastructure.
Transportation and Logistics, especially across busy GCC ports and airports, depend on highly orchestrated IT systems. With rising tourism and trade volumes, Riverbed’s platform ensures that downtime doesn’t disrupt passenger or cargo flow—an essential factor for economic growth.
And finally, Healthcare. As hospitals adopt digital records and telemedicine, downtime or slow application performance can directly impact patient outcomes. At Riverbed, we support this transition by keeping systems running smoothly and securely.
Given the rapid adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud environments in the GCC, how does Riverbed’s platform support organizations in managing the complexities associated with these infrastructures?
Hybrid and multi-cloud environments are now the norm in the GCC, but managing them can be overwhelming. The Riverbed Platform is designed to simplify this by offering unified observability across on-prem, cloud, SaaS, and endpoint environments – giving IT teams a clear, consistent view across the entire digital landscape.
Smart OTel helps organisations make sense of the vast telemetry data generated by hybrid infrastructures. It filters and enriches this data, reduces alert noise, and integrates OpenTelemetry and non-compliant tools into a single source of truth. This enables faster, data-driven decisions.
Our solutions also improves operational efficiency by combining observability and AI-powered troubleshooting. Features like Riverbed IQ Assist use generative AI to identify root causes, explain issues in plain language, and guide remediation – speeding up resolution across complex, distributed environments.
Automation is another strength. Agentic AI can take proactive actions such as scaling cloud resources or addressing predicted slowdowns, all while integrating with existing ITSM workflows like ServiceNow.
For organisations in the GCC, this means better cost control, improved performance, and enhanced compliance with local data regulations. Whether it’s ensuring uptime across remote branches or managing bandwidth across multiple regions, Riverbed gives IT teams the tools to stay in control.
Looking ahead, how do you envision Riverbed’s role in shaping the future of IT operations and observability in the GCC, especially with the integration of advanced AI technologies?
We’re at a critical inflection point, and IT operations must evolve from reactive to intelligent and predictive. At Riverbed, we’re well-positioned to lead this shift, having integrating advanced AI into our unified observability offering – enabling IT teams to proactively manage performance, user experience, and business outcomes.
With infrastructures becoming more complex, our AI capabilities will help organisations anticipate issues, reduce downtime, and optimise resources across multi-cloud and edge environments. This is essential in a region where agility, efficiency, and seamless digital experiences are critical for competitive advantage.
Our AI doesn’t just highlight problems – it provides context-aware analysis, guiding teams to root causes and recommending next steps. This streamlines troubleshooting and cuts resolution times dramatically.
As remote and hybrid work become the norm, predictive digital experience insights will also be crucial. Our platform ensures IT can maintain visibility and control over end-user performance, wherever work happens.
Looking forward, as smart city and Industry 4.0 projects grow, our AI-driven insights at the edge will help GCC organisations scale securely and sustainably. From capacity planning to automated incident response, our platform empowers IT to operate with foresight and precision.
