Cradlepoint Follows ‘Pathway to 5G’
Appoints two executives to drive growth in enterprise and public-sector markets
On the heels of receiving FCC certification for its Gigabit LTE edge routers, Cradlepoint has announced the hire of Eric Purcell and Mark Pugerude to help expand the company’s Pathway to 5G strategy.
The Lowdown: Both Purcell, new senior vice president of partner sales and alliances, and Pugerude, new chief sales officer, have more than 25 years of experience in enterprise networking, telecommunications, channels, strategic partnerships, and as-a-service delivery models.
The Details: Purcell comes to Cradlepoint from Box, an enterprise cloud content management platform provider. There, he led global service provider channel sales for more than five years. Before that, Purcell held a number of senior channel roles at Cisco, supporting AT&T partner sales and Cisco’s Borderless Network Architecture in the Americas.
Pugerude was a senior executive at tech companies serving the enterprise and service provider markets and, before that, held the role of chief sales officer at InfoVista, which provides application intelligence solutions for SD-WAN environments. He also worked for GENBAND (now Ribbon Communications) and Broadwing Communications (now CenturyLink).
Background: Just last week, Cradlepoint announced that it became the first provider of Gigabit Class Private LTE edge router solutions to achieve FCC certification and Initial Commercial Deployment (ICD) status.
Based on its NetCloud service, the company’s new Private LTE solutions support the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) shared spectrum at 3.5 GHz and are part of Cradlepoint’s Pathway to 5G strategy – the development and evolution of technologies that will culminate in 5G down the line.
Under the ICD program, Cradlepoint will collaborate with CBRS infrastructure partners and systems integrators to provide customers with Private LTE proof-of-concept (POC) networks. The vendor, which has been conducting Private LTE field trials since the fall of 2017 under a variety of experimental FCC licenses, joined the CBRS Alliance earlier this year.
The Buzz: “A shift to wireless is accelerating with a majority of organizations citing that Gigabit LTE and 5G is likely to affect their WAN road map,” said George Mulhern, CEO of Cradlepoint. “Mark and Eric bring the right go-to-market knowledge and experience in the enterprise, public sector, and service provider realms that will help Cradlepoint and our channel and service provider partners capitalize on the wireless wave by providing customers with a Pathway to 5G.”
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