New Riverbed Certification Riverbed Technology is celebrating after being named as the first wide area networking (WAN) optimisation vendor to receive validation for both Microsoft SharePoint Online and Microsoft Exchange Online in the software company's Business Productivity Online Suite - Dedicated (BPOS-D).

"If you aren't familiar with BPOS-D, it's Microsoft's cloud-based implementation of several of their applications," writes marketing evangelist Evan Marcus on the Riverbed Technology blog.

He explains that using BPOS-D with Riverbed Technology's own Steelhead WAN optimisation appliance can offer significant advantages in terms of resource usage than deploying the software on a conventional network.

"You can get the same kind of reduced network bandwidth and improved application performance ... as you can using the same applications when you host them in your own data centre," he suggests.

He points out that the -D suffix on the product name means that the resources used by the BPOS-D platform are dedicated to the one business, with other options available for organisations of different sizes.