Riverbed, one of the leaders in AI-powered digital employee experience, recently announced that it has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Digital Employee Experience 2026 Vendor Assessment (Doc #US53014625, June 2026). The IDC MarketScape evaluated vendors on both their current capabilities and forward-looking strategies for supporting organizations in delivering productive, seamless digital employee experiences.
Riverbed sees its placement in the Leaders Category as validation of its Aternity platform, a converged observability and experience platform that coordinates endpoint telemetry, application performance data, network path visibility, and employee sentiment within a single operational environment.
In its Vendor Assessment, the IDC MarketScape noted that “the Riverbed Orion agentic AI framework introduced in early 2026 extends Aternity’s analytical layer into governed autonomous execution, with role-specific interfaces for employees, service desk staff, IT engineers, and IT leaders. This architecture is notable because it embeds AI governance, policy control, and human-in-the-loop escalation into the platform foundation rather than treating these as secondary configurations added post-deployment. As a result, organizations pursuing a shift from assisted to autonomous operations have a structurally coherent path, rather than an improvised one.”
“Enterprise AI is fundamentally changing how IT organizations operate,” saidย Richard Tworek, Chief Technology Officer, at Riverbed.ย “As organizations move from AI-assisted operations toward intelligent, autonomous execution, they need a trusted operational foundation built on comprehensive observability, digital employee experience, and responsible AI governance. We believe this recognition from the IDC MarketScape validates our long-term strategy of helping customers move beyond reactive IT toward AI-powered operations that improve employee productivity, strengthen resilience, and deliver better business outcomes.”
The IDC MarketScape also highlighted Aternity’s integrated architecture: โThis integrated architectureโspanning physical devices, virtual desktop infrastructure, mobile, and frontline endpointsโis designed to address the diagnostic complexity that arises when experience failures propagate across multiple operational layers simultaneously.โย By combining endpoint intelligence with application, network, and user experience insights, Riverbed provides IT organizations with a unified operational view that enables faster issue resolution and more proactive digital experience management.
“Organizations are increasingly looking beyond visibility alone toward platforms that can intelligently automate IT operations while maintaining governance and human oversight,” saidย Shannon Kalvar, Senior Research Director, Enterprise Systems Management, Enterprise Client Platforms, Observability, and AIOps at IDC.ย “Riverbed’s recognition as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape reflects its strategy of bringing together observability, digital employee experience, and governed AI automation into a unified platform that helps enterprises improve employee productivity while preparing for more autonomous IT operations.”
The recognition comes as enterprises increasingly seek AI-powered platforms that improve digital employee experience while maintaining governance, security, and operational control. Riverbed continues to accelerate customer adoption of Aternity on a global basis, surpassing USD 100 million in annual revenue as of the first quarter ofย 2026, and in the same quarter, Aternity product modules reached 8.9 million installs, up 40% year-over-year. Many of these deployments support highly regulated organizations in financial services, government, and healthcare, where reliability, policy enforcement, and auditability are essential.
