Silver Peak Taps Ex-Ruckus Exec to Lead Sales, Channel Operations
Ian Whiting will oversee efforts to expand engagement with partners, accelerate customer acquisition
Silver Peak, a player in the booming software defined-WAN (SD-WAN) space, is bringing on industry veteran Ian Whiting to lead its sales operations and channel and service provider strategy.
The Lowdown: Whiting, whose official title is president of global field operations for the Santa Clara, California, company, has a previous work history that includes Ruckus Networks, Engyte, Fusion-io, and Riverbed Technology.
The Details: Whiting will have broad responsibilities at Silver Peak, including leading direct and indirect sales, sales operations, and the go-to-market strategy for channel partners and service providers. He’s being tasked with creating a strategy to expand Silver Peak’s engagement with the channel and accelerate customer acquisition.
Silver Peak has been pushing to grow its channel and customer base. Almost a year ago, the 16-year-old company announced that its EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform was certified to be deployed on Google Cloud – it already was deployable on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud – and in November 2018 launched a range of enhancements to its Partner Edge program.
The Impact: The SD-WAN space is crowded and highly competitive, populated by such established vendors as VMware, Cisco, Huawei, and Citrix, as well as pure-play players like Aryaka and Versa Networks. According to an October report by IHS Markit Technology, Silver Peak ranked No. 5 based on revenue in a market that will reach $4.4 billion in 2023.
Background: Whiting spent more than four years as first chief commercial officer and then president of Ruckus through some M&A activity. The company was acquired by Arris in 2017 and then merged with CommScope in 2019. Before that, he held executive positions with software maker Engyte, systems maker Fusion-io, and networking vendors Riverbed and Brocade.
The Buzz: “I am thrilled to join a company at the forefront of innovation in a rapidly growing and evolving market like SD-WAN,” Whiting said. “Having an industry-leading product that meets and, in many cases, exceeds market expectations provides us with a strong foundation to accelerate and scale out our go-to-market activities with a balance of direct end customer engagements and an unwavering commitment to our global channel and service provider partners. Strategic partnerships are critical to our success, and only by partnering with the best of the best will we fully capitalize on the enormous opportunity in front of us and assure our customer’s WAN transformation initiatives are successful.”
“While no one can match our top-down outcome-oriented approach to automation with Unity EdgeConnect, we must simultaneously focus our efforts toward scaling our ability to engage, enable, and empower our sales teams and channels to bring the transformational value of our SD-WAN edge platform to the masses,” Silver Peak founder and CEO David Hughes said. “Ian brings a unique combination of proven go-to-market expertise and success and a no-nonsense leadership style that we need to scale our go-to-market motions with partners and end customers to fully capitalize on the opportunity in front of us to lead the SD-WAN market.”
