SD-WAN FEATURED ARTICLE

CloudGenix Adds Personnel as SD-WAN Market Heats Up

March 23, 2016

By Tara Seals, Contributing Writer

CloudGenix has announced that Matt Hickey has joined the executive team as vice president of worldwide sales.

Also, Martin Casado, SVP and GM, Networking and Security Business Unit, VMware, has joined the CloudGenix advisory board.

The moves demonstrate the continuing growth of the software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) space, which looks to revolutionize networking by transforming legacy WANs into a radically simplified, secure, application-defined fabric. SD-WANs provide enterprises with the ability to virtualize heterogeneous underlying transports, apply automation to the WAN and run traffic over a mix of public broadband, private MPLS and other types of links within one management structure.




According to an IHS (News - Alert) Infonetics survey, about 45 percent of businesses plan to spend more on SD-WAN over the next two years as they look to reduce the complexity and cost associated with enterprise WANs and adopt a variety of SaaS (News - Alert) and other cloud services. Generally, SD-WANs can achieve more than twice the performance of legacy networks at less than half the cost -- leading to a much faster time-to-value once deployed, and extending datacenter-class security to the network edge.

"Today's business trends reflect widespread adoption of the cloud, virtualization and mobile -- all technologies whose benefits are diminished with the limitations of hardware-based WANs," said Kumar Ramachandran (News - Alert), CEO and co-founder of CloudGenix.

For its part, CloudGenix controls network application performance based upon application-performance SLAs and business priority, and enables secure access to hybrid-cloud and virtualized applications via SD-WANs rather than a complex maze of networking hardware. Ramachandran said that the CloudGenix SD-WAN delivers direct cloud access and eliminates proprietary hardware, and as a result delivers 50 percent to 70 percent reduced WAN costs.

The solution is designed for mid-sized and large enterprises that want to reduce networking cost and complexity by virtualizing WANs, securely connecting users with applications and reducing remote-office infrastructure.

Prior to his latest role as senior director of sales at EMC (News - Alert), Hickey served as sales manager, where he was key in the success of EMC's Data Domain and Avamar data protection products, He was also responsible for all EMC products and services across storage, data protection, virtualization and security. At CloudGenix, he will be tasked with growing the company globally.

"CloudGenix's revolutionary application-defined approach to building networks is one of the most transformative changes for WANs," said Hickey. "The feedback from customers is that the shift from routers to CloudGenix's application-defined fabric is even more impactful than the shift from spinning drives to flash was in storage. I'm excited to be on the front lines of this market shift, helping customers migrate to the cloud while gaining the cost and performance benefits that only CloudGenix SD-WAN delivers."

Meanwhile, as co-creator of the SDN category with years of experience implementing SDN on customer sites, Casado's expertise will help the CloudGenix team execute its strategy to extend SDN benefits to WANs.

"I'm excited to join the CloudGenix advisory board because the company's SD-WAN technology holds the promise of bringing the benefits of the cloud to the last bastion of legacy technology -- networking," he said. "CloudGenix SD-WAN is poised to take SDN to the next level by enabling a carrier-agnostic, hybrid WAN that features operational simplicity and improved security."

"A pioneer of the SDN movement and CTO and founder of Nicira Networks, Casado has led the way to fundamentally redesigning networks, offering the operational, capital and security benefits software provides," added Ramachandran. "He is a perfect addition to the CloudGenix advisory board as we transition the WAN industry from a hardware to software model."




Edited by Maurice Nagle

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