Global SD-WAN contender Silver Peak announced three new senior executive appointments as part of its future plans.
The new appointments include Ken Laversin, Chief Revenue Officer, Kathleen Swift, Senior Vice President, Human Resources and Rick Valentine, Chief Customer Officer.
A company spokesperson said the executive appointments, which follow a series of regional and channel leadership appointments, will enable Silver Peak to accelerate business expansion and sales through its enterprise and service provider channels.
Silver Peak founder and chief executive officer David Hughes said: “We have an enormous opportunity to establish Silver Peak as the SD-WAN market leader, enabling our customers to realise the full transformational promise of the cloud with a self-driving wide area network. Seasoned leaders with proven track records like Ken, Kathleen and Rick will enable us to rapidly expand our go-to-market, scale our organisation and deliver the highest quality of experience to our customers, underscoring our commitment to winning in the market.”
Ken Laversin, a 20-year Silicon Valley veteran, joins Silver Peak as chief revenue officer, leading the global sales, channels and revenue generating teams worldwide. Prior to Silver Peak, Laversin served as senior vice president of worldwide sales and alliances at Jasper Technologies during their hyper-growth phase and later acquisition by Cisco in 2016.
At Cisco, Laversin led global IoT software sales for the Cisco Jasper business unit. Laversin began his career in sales roles at Siebel Systems, which was acquired by Oracle In 2006. At Oracle, he served as vice president of North American sales for the company’s BSS/OSS service provider software division. Laversin’s proven experience in scaling global sales teams, coupled with his knowledge of successfully executing go-to-market partnerships within the communications service provider market, will help Silver Peak to accelerate revenue growth and expand the company’s global SD-WAN leadership position.
Laversin said: “To fuel business expansion, I will initially focus on four key areas; expanding service provider partnerships and go-to-market initiatives, doubling the global sales and channel organisations by hiring the best and brightest people, standardising sales processes and accelerating global partner programmes and enablement.”
Kathleen Swift was vice president of global human resources for Ruckus Wireless. Prior to joining Ruckus, Swift served as the vice president of human resources at Complete Genomics, Opnext, Extreme Networks and Terayon. Swift also served in human resources roles at Avanex, Com21, Questlink and Hitachi.
Rick Valentine joins Silver Peak as chief customer officer. Prior to Silver Peak, Valentine served as chief customer officer at Symantec/Veritas Software leading customer success for the technical support software portfolio spanning consumer and enterprise customers across 11 global locations and 15+ languages, including a team of 1,500 worldwide associates.
Before that Valentine served as general manager of employee management solutions at Intuit and vice president and general manager of Sage SaaS and Cloud services at Sage Software.
Valentine said: “Silver Peak is in an enviable position in the SD-WAN market and my focus will be on making it as easy as possible for customers to do business with us and ensuring that we deliver the highest quality of customer experience in the industry. The success of our customers is our number-one business priority.”
