Pros
The first 5 years had excellent technology and good management in key roles; the hands-off style of the CEO let some mistakes to come up in this period that caused some key employees to leave or switch roles to the detriment of the company, but it seemed possible lessons could be learned. Benefits in the US are fairly leading, although they aren't as good as some of the competition the most important stuff is covered well. Internationally, the benefits are far less competive on the important benefits, but the free snacks and drinks are maintained. After Riverbed learned some mistakes when expanding internationally, the priority should have been to make Riverbed a more competitive employer in the local market, rather than just duplicate what HR thinks is standard in the US market and replicate it outside the US rather than adapt policies to local IT markets. There are still significant HR issues in international offices to this day.
Cons
Riverbed lost focus, notably with an acquisition that: was not tightly screened enough for solution/trending market fit for Riverbed had issues working through the culture of the acquired firm was too expensive in cost for the value of the acquired company; the founders of the acquired firm were paid hundreds of millions USD and overstated the value of the firm; but their employees got very little and a wave of key employees with critical value for Riverbed left, adding to delays in integrating the companies had delays and confusing messages about the overlap in products and the timeline of updating or merging the products or dropping some products had a model for implementing overlay sales and SEs that had a lot of challenges was late in simplifying installation of the offerings that are a good market fit but too complex to install without SE/PS has a delayed, incomplete partner enablement plan on the new offerings. Some of the lessons learned with the Mazu acquisition happened again because of poor planning and introverted culture from a fair bit of the acquired employees and management that didn't focus on a partner enablement strategy. These were factors in disappointing Wall Street and turning to being bought out to go private. The acquisition was communicated very poorly and it seemed the benefit was mostly for the c-staff as there was a layoff that did not make sense for growing organically. The private equity firm's first call to employees pushed them to invest $5k of their own monies in the private company, rather than offering equity in lieu of RSUs or ESPP. This was a bad message at the wrong time. Losing the SVP TechOps, CTO, GM for the Storage Delivery BU, the Storage Delivery BU Technical Leader, and a key engineer for SteelCentral over the past several months after a previous worry when the co-founder left and took some key product talent and engineers to a startup has added to the uncertainty about Riverbed's ability to innovate and focus besides the distraction caused by the privatization.