Name: SteelHead
Rating: 4.5 (60 reviews)

Overview

Product Information on SteelHead

Updated 13th October 2025

What is SteelHead?

SteelHead is a software that enables organizations to optimize application performance across wide area networks by utilizing techniques such as data deduplication, application streamlining, and protocol optimization. The software is designed to improve the speed and reliability of data transfer between remote locations and data centers, helping businesses address challenges related to bandwidth limitations and network latency. SteelHead supports visibility into network traffic and user experience, providing tools for troubleshooting and performance monitoring. It facilitates efficient delivery of both on-premises and cloud-hosted applications, contributing to smoother workflow and resource utilization in distributed environments.

Overall experience with SteelHead

Comms Responsible

3B - 10B USD, Manufacturing

FAVORABLE

“Impressive Results with Minimal Configuration: An Overview”

4.0

Sep 13, 2024

Easy to deploy, impressive results with little need to fine tune.

Network Engineer

250M - 500M USD, Banking

CRITICAL

“Overall setup and implementation is easy but configuration is not as intuitive”

3.0

Feb 6, 2019

Optimization of the major protocols work well but not that well with Citrix and Cifs protocols. Setup was easy except for CIFS.

About Company

Company Description

Riverbed helps organizations optimize their user’s experiences by leveraging AI automation for the prevention, identification, and resolution of IT issues. With over 20 years of experience in data collection and AI and machine learning, Riverbed’s open and AI-powered observability platform and solutions optimize digital experiences and greatly improves IT efficiency. Riverbed also offers Application Acceleration solutions that provide fast, agile, secure acceleration of any app, over any network, to users anywhere. Together with our customers globally, we are empowering next-generation digital experiences.

Company Details

Company type

Private

Year Founded

2002

Head office location

San Francisco, United States

Number of employees

1001 - 5000

Website

http://www.riverbed.com

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Key Insights

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Reviewer Insights for: SteelHead

Performance of SteelHead Across Market Features

SteelHead Likes & Dislikes

Ease of deployment. Little interference in case it is not properly configured.

I like that it was easy to implement inline and not wccp. It's just a bump in the wire but when it's in , it's hard to configure the cifs protocol but other protocols are easy to turn on .

We can categories the services product which we can optimize

Very expensive. Newer protocols are harder to accelerate and require more effort to properly tune them.

The integration of the esx is not as intuitive . The all in the box is difficult to configure and not worth the effort . With the wan optimiation by itself it easy to setup and manage but it doesn't optimize all of the protocols. Has problems with some of them. CIFs difficult to configure.

As of now we did not see any dislikes

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Peer Discussions

SteelHead Reviews and Ratings

Recommended Gartner Insights

Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization

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1B-10B USD

Manufacturing

Review Source

Impressive Results with Minimal Configuration: An Overview

IT Project Manager

50M-1B USD

World class product for SD-WAN

5.0

Nov 3, 2023

Excellent piece of SD WAN technology, it will help us to optimize the WAN bandwidth

Director of IT

Gov't/PS/Ed

Education

SteelHead...technology you can trust.

Apr 17, 2023

If you are looking for an excellent all-around product that compresses packets to gain performance, look no further.

IT Manager

Construction

A good product who provide an added value since more than 10 years

Feb 27, 2023

Reduce significantly since more than 10 years my network costs

Senior Network Security Engineer

Miscellaneous

Efficient WAN Optimization

Feb 6, 2022

Infrastructure performance enhancer, Riverbed is one of the best WAN optimizer in the market. In my tenure we have utilized this product at fullest when ever we faced traffic chocking issues in MPLS zones. This product is very useful where huge data flow happens and it maximizes the efficiency and performance of the network. Latency is always a concern in big organizations, this product is best suited to mitigate such issues.