The new product family, dubbed Stingray, includes application delivery controllers (ADCs), Web application firewalls and Web content optimization (WCO) tools. The ADC and application firewall technology comes from Zeus and the WCO from Aptimize. Riverbed, however, has added its own scripting language plus a range of features to make the technologies compatible with its existing WAN optimization appliances and other products.

"The whole idea behind Stingray is asymmetric optimization -- that is, they only need to be delivered from the data center whether that data center is a private or public cloud," said Apurva Dave, vice president of marketing and product management, Stingray Business Unit, who emphasized that the products that form the Stingray family now constitute Riverbed's "asymmetric optimization strategy."

The new Stingray products are being synchronized to the 8.0 release and include a number of enhancements. But the important thing, says Naveen Prabhu, senior product marketing manager at Riverbed, is that the three tools that came to Riverbed from Zeus and Aptimize now have a consistent look and feel, can work with each other, and have utility-style pricing that is more consistent with Riverbed's products.

Stingray 8.0 products are available for SMB customers all the way up to large enterprises. They are available under more op-ex-friendly, monthly subscription pricing schemes.

The 3 new Stingray products are as follows:

Riverbed® Stingray™ Traffic Manager (formerly Zeus Traffic Manager) frees applications from the constraints of proprietary, hardware-based application delivery controllers (ADCs), enabling them to run in any physical, virtual, or cloud environment, and to migrate and scale on demand. Stingray Traffic Manager, which is one of the fastest software-based ADCs on the market, is used by seven of the top 10 global telecommunications providers, and also powers some of the most popular sites on the web, including Whitepages.com, Gilt Groupe, Domino's Pizza, and the BBC.

Riverbed® Stingray™ Application Firewall (formerly Zeus Application Firewall) is a sophisticated, application-aware, web application firewall for deep application security. Now it’s possible to protect against known and unknown attacks at the application layer, secure applications, and meet compliance requirements with confidence.

Riverbed® Stingray™ Aptimizer (formerley Aptimize website accelerator) is a software-based, web content optimization solution that is set up on the web server for the dramatic acceleration of web-based applications and websites. Stingray Aptimizer dynamically groups activities for fewer long distance round trips, compresses images to maximize available bandwidth, increases caching for faster repeat visits, and prioritizes actions to provide the best possible response time for loading web pages on any browser.