I couldn’t be more excited to join the Sysdig family as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales. I’m humbled and honored to lead a team of incredibly talented sales professionals who are helping some of the world’s most innovative companies monitor and secure their cloud native applications.
The past six years of my career were, without a doubt, the most exhilarating, fulfilling, and educational time of my professional life. We built a remarkable company at Nimble Storage; a place where very talented, genuinely great people came together to form a gritty, “no jerks”, results oriented culture. I’ll always be a proud Nimble alum, and the bonds we built will transcend jobs for life. Integrating Nimble into HPE was also a great learning experience for me. The opportunity to play a leadership role on an integration of a $1.2B acquisition into a Fortune 200 company, and then run a $1B+ business doesn’t present itself every day. I’m grateful for the experience that I gained and the friends I made during my time at HPE.
This spring, I came to the conclusion that it was time to find a new professional challenge. By far the most important attribute that I was evaluating was culture. I wanted to join a company whose values aligned with mine, a company with a distinct identity to which I could be additive. I’ve been lucky enough to work in multiple environments where I genuinely loved the whole experience of my job. And once you’ve experienced that, you cannot accept anything less. A strong culture was an absolute prerequisite. When former Nimble CEO Suresh Vasudevan joined Sysdig, I became quite interested. Suresh has been a mentor and a friend for many years, and he has a well-earned reputation for successfully executing at pretty much everything he does. So, the idea of working for him again was quite appealing. Meeting the rest of the executive team, I was blown away by the caliber and character of everyone across the board. There is massive innovation DNA here: our founder Loris Degioanni co-created Wireshark. John Martin, Adityashankar Kini, and Apurva Dave were a part of Riverbed becoming the category king in WAN Optimization. The pedigree is great across the board, but the best part is that all of these folks are humble, gritty, good people who are all aligned behind a vision of creating a great culture. This was an all star team that I wanted to join!
The other major factor for me was market segment. I made a decision to challenge myself to learn something new by diving into a domain on the cutting edge of technological innovation. The storage industry has been very good to me over the past decade, but I had a strong desire to step out of my comfort zone and prove to myself that my brain is still malleable enough to learn new things. This facet of my search was informed by a strong belief that we are in the early stages of a massive platform shift; a shift away from proprietary, closed, on premise systems and towards open, distributed, cloud native systems. Look no further than Microsoft’s pending acquisition of GitHub for $7.5B for evidence of just how important the open source software development community has become. The cloud has enabled collaboration at a scale never seen before, and every single industry is leveraging this new approach to gain a competitive advantage. When platform shifts like this occur, there is tremendous opportunity for new companies to emerge as massive winners and new category kings.
Sysdig’s Cloud Native Intelligence Platform solves a serious business challenge that all enterprises face when moving to dynamically orchestrated services in multi-cloud environments. Legacy monitoring and security tools are simply incapable of delivering deep insight into what is happening inside of containers, especially once microservices architecture is deployed at scale. When cloud native applications become mission critical to the business, Sysdig becomes indispensable. On the surface, our products are cool monitoring and security tools. But the foundational element is that we have tapped into a new data source.
To quote our CEO, “The insight was that every interaction with a host – application accesses, network activity, file reads and writes – translates into a system call within the kernel. If one could find a way to enrich system calls with all the relevant context, and translate those into a stream of metrics that can be analyzed real-time and at scale, you would have a third source of truth – at least as powerful, and complementary, to logs and network traffic.” We’ve built a product that has attracted some of the world’s most respected firms across financial services, media, technology, and government. It is remarkable to see the response from clients when they see what Sysdig can do! What’s really exciting is that we’ve just begun to leverage this new data source. There are a multitude of interesting things on the roadmap, so stay tuned.
I’m so grateful for the opportunity to join the executive team at Sysdig, excited to build upon the foundation laid by my teammates, and eager to accelerate our journey. I’ve got great teammates, innovative solutions, and a market segment growing like crazy…what’s not to like?!?