In January 2012, Riverbed Technology announced version 9.5 of its Cascade network performance management solution, which included a number of major enhancements. Collectively, the new capabilities are designed to improve visibility into the health and activity of applications and services traversing networks from the branch to the data center. In particular, the addition of the Cascade Virtual Shark, a software-based version of the existing Cascade Shark appliance, combines with added support for recognizing and representing Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) and Load Balancers within the monitored environment to offer new insights and improved visibility into advanced, highly-virtualized data centers.