Silver Peak Hires Two Former Riverbed Employees

Silver Peak (News - Alert), platinum sponsor of next month’s SD-WAN Expo, has added a couple of new leaders to its team. The SD-WAN solution provider has brought aboard Kristian Thyregod and Allan Paton.

Thyregod serves as vice president for the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region. He’s based out of Geneva, Switzerland, and reports to Chris Helfer, senior vice president of worldwide sales. Thyregod previously was in charge of the EMEA business at River Technology. He’s also worked for CA Technologies, Dell/EMC, and IBM (News - Alert).

Paton takes on the role of regional sales director for the United Kingdom and Ireland. Reporting to Thyregod, Paton will be based in London. Like his new boss, Paton is also a former Riverbed (News - Alert) guy. He was regional vice president for Ireland, South Africa, and the U.K. at his former employer. He’s also worked at Opnet Technologies.

Silver Peak has more than 600 customers in production with its Unity EdgeConnect solution. The company is about 14 years old, having started out selling WAN optimization solutions. It came out with its first SD-WAN solution in 2015. Today SD-WAN is its focus.

IDC (News - Alert) expects the SD-WAN worldwide market to be worth more than $8 billion in 2021. The adoption of cloud services is widely noted as a driving force that has led SD-WAN to take hold at this particular point in time.

“When more applications move to the cloud and become available via the software-as-a-service model,” notes John Vincenzo (News - Alert), senior vice president and CMO at SD-WAN solutions provider Silver Peak, the internet comes into play. And when customers are connecting to applications on the internet, it makes sense to use the internet to connect to those applications,” he adds.

Ensuring WAN performance also becomes more important in a cloud-centric world, notes Rohit Mehra, vice president of network infrastructure at IDC.

"As public and private cloud use continues to grow, WAN performance becomes critical to latency-sensitive and mission-critical workloads and inter-datacenter business continuity," says Mehra. "Accordingly, as enterprises plan and implement comprehensive cloud strategies, WAN architectures need to be considered alongside, and in conjunction with, data center infrastructure. Moreover, as enterprises move business processes to the cloud, there is a greater need to fully integrate cloud-sourced services into WAN environments to ensure workload/application performance, availability, and security."