I was completely riveted by our 2014 annual Sales Kickoff (SKO) as a new Technical Marketing Engineer for Riverbed Performance Management at Riverbed Technology.

We started the week with a room full of eager participants, motivational tunes, and two silhouettes of boxers dancing across the stage as "Champions by Design."

With keynotes led by CEO and Chairman Jerry Kennelly, no one doubted that we meant business-not-as-usual with this year's SKO.

Riverbed has transformed from a one-product market leader to a multi-product platform with Gartner Magic Quadrant dominance in Application Performance Monitoring,  Application Delivery, and WAN Optimization.

Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Kate Hutchison provided a keynote that led the week and gave us the context for our new vision and strategy with the following highlights:

Our Vision-"Enable organizations to embrace location-independent computing to better leverage global resources, radically reduce the cost of running their business, and maximize employee productivity."
Our Strategy-"To offer the most complete platform for location-independent computing that ensures applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed, and performance issues are detected and fixed before end users even notice."

Following the events led by President of Field Operations David Peranich, my job was to take it all in-get to know my colleagues better and enjoy the celebration. And when we say celebrate, we were not kidding-the week roared on with the theme of champions. We even had an evening of real games at AT&T Park in San Francisco.

During the week, we also attended sessions to get geared up with stories about location-independent computing and how each of our solutions enables organizations to achieve that goal. Check out these guys playing a wrap up game of [Riverbed] "Operation" to diagnose and cure problems with apps.

I can't wait to start providing support for our sales engineers to tell our multi-product platform story. This story has become completely unique to Riverbed and the industry. Here's an example of a video we did that shows part of the story-both application performance management (APM) and network performance management (NPM) data on one easy-to-navigate dashboard.

For more detailed information, see Network Performance Management and Application Performance Management.

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