Riverbed Elevates Mountford To Replace Retiring CEO
In the midst of a pivot from a WAN optimization business to an SD-WAN and cloud networking and application and network performance monitoring, Riverbed Technology is also changing CEOs.
Effective immediately, Paul Mountford, a four-year veteran at Riverbed, is taking over as CEO of the 16-year-old company from co-founder Jerry M. Kennelly, who will retire after he serves in an advisory role for the rest of the month. Mountford's appointment follows an internal and external search by the Riverbed board of directors.
Mountford was previously senior vice president and chief sales officer at Riverbed, which has undergone significant changes to the global sales organization and partner program during his time in the role. He spent 16 years in senior roles at Cisco and was CEO of the Web intelligence company Sentillian.
Riverbed has been both acquiring and organically developing products for software-defined solutions and managing application performance for the last few years. In addition to its business in SteelHead WAN optimization appliances, the company is now emphasizing its SteelCentral performance management platform and control suite and its SteelConnect SD-WAN solution, which includes optimization of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The company is in the midst of rolling out a new partner program called Riverbed Rise, in which partners earn dividends based on sales or training and that can be converted to rebates, market development funds or training vouchers. Riverbed will fully transition to Rise on Aug. 1.
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 05, 2018