Praveen Akkiraju CEO, Viptela

Viptela, a software-defined WAN company, 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.

“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 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 EMC, Akkiraju helped lead the converged infrastructure provider to the number one market share position, while tripling revenues to $2.1 billion and achieving profitability. Prior to VCE, he spent more than 19 years at Cisco building and leading major routing platform business. In his last role, he was senior VP & GM 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 Akkiraju, CEO. “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, Inc. “Praveen brings the right combination of execution experience, credibility and technical expertise to help Viptela achieve this vision.”