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Viptela Appoints Praveen Akkiraju as Its New CEO
[January 12, 2017]

Viptela Appoints Praveen Akkiraju as Its New CEO


Viptela, the Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) company, today announced the appointment of Praveen Akkiraju as its new CEO. Amir Khan, co-founder and current CEO will continue playing an active role as President and board member.

This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170112005583/en/

New Viptela CEO Praveen Akkiraju is former CEO of VCE and Cisco GM. (Photo: Business Wire)

New Viptela CEO Praveen Akkiraju is former CEO of VCE and Cisco (News - Alert) GM. (Photo: Business Wire)

"In just four years, Viptela has pioneered the SD-WAN market and is now the most widely deployed solution in the industry. We are thrilled that Praveen is joining us to accelerate the next phase of our growth," said Amir Khan. "Praveen has built and led some of the fastest growing businesses in data center and enterprise networking. He is passionate about working with customers across the enterprise, service provider and SMB markets to enable their next generation WAN transformation."

Over the past four years as CEO of VCE, a division of Dell (News - Alert) EMC, Mr. Akkiraju helped lead the converged infrastructure provider to the No.1 market share position, while tripling revenues to $2.1B and achieving profitability. Prior to VCE, he spent more than 19 years at Cisco building and leading every major routing platform business. In his last role, he was senior vice president & general manager of Cisco's Enterprise Networking group, where he rebuilt the strategy and business for the multi-billion dollar ISR and ASR product portfolio.



"Our customers are going through a fundamental transition in their business models and technology architecture. As pioneers of SD-WAN, Viptela is uniquely positioned to simplify the critical infrastructure connecting users at the edge of the network to applications in the cloud," said Praveen Akkiraju, CEO of Viptela. "Great products and companies are built on making the right design choices and I believe Viptela got it right by starting with a rock solid routing infrastructure to create a scalable and secure fabric which delivers a range of services from SD-WAN to security to seamless cloud connectivity."

"Over the past decade, we've seen a fundamental disruption of enterprise IT architectures with virtualization and the advent of the app economy. Viptela is delivering the next generation network fabric to enable this business transformation and migration to the cloud," said Carl Eschenbach, Sequoia partner and former president and COO, VMware. "Praveen brings the right combination of execution experience, credibility and technical expertise to help Viptela achieve this vision."


About Viptela
Viptela provides Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) technology that virtualizes WAN infrastructure. The platform allows global companies to build carrier agnostic, secure, policy-controlled and cost-effective WANs. Viptela has been deployed at thousands of sites by more than 25 Fortune 500 enterprises; and major carriers including Verizon (News - Alert) and Singtel to deliver managed SD-WAN services. The company has been named a Next Billion Dollar Startup by Forbes, 2016 Red Herring Top 100 Global Company and CRN Tech Innovator. Viptela is backed by Redline Capital, Northgate Capital and Sequoia Capital (News - Alert). For more information, visit: viptela.com or follow us on Twitter @viptela.


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