Aviatrix Attracts Veteran Leadership Team to Build the Enterprise Multi-Cloud Backbone
June 19, 2019
Aviatrix today announced that the team that “virtualized the network” at Nicira and built it into a billion-dollar business at VMware has joined the company to build the Enterprise Multi-Cloud Backbone.
- Steve Mullaney, former CEO at Nicira and senior vice president and general manager of networking and security at VMware, has joined Aviatrix as president and CEO.
- John Jendricks, former vice president of business operations at Nicira and VMware CEO’s chief of staff, has joined Aviatrix as chief operating officer.
- Rod Stuhlmuller, former senior director of product marketing at Nicira and of VMware’s networking and security business, has joined Aviatrix as vice president of marketing.
“We’ve landed the dream team,” said Devdutt Yellurkar, Aviatrix board member and general partner at CRV. “Steve recognized that enterprises were rapidly shifting their computing model from on-premises data centers to the cloud, and that this shift is going to be 10 times as big and happen 1,000 times faster than the shift from mainframe to client-server. The team clearly sees the opportunity, and they are going to make it a defining moment in the evolution of enterprise computing.”
“The corporate data center is dead,” said Steve Mullaney, president and CEO of Aviatrix. “Enterprises have made the decision that they are ‘all in’ on the cloud, and it is no longer fun and games for them. This is serious business. The cloud is the way they will do enterprise computing, but that requires the right network and security architecture for the cloud. Aviatrix will provide this infrastructure by building the enterprise cloud backbone.”
Steve Mullaney has more than 30 years of experience in networking and security. Prior to Aviatrix, he was the CEO of Nicira, which was acquired by VMware in 2012 for $1.26 Billion. He joined VMware as its senior vice president and general manager of the Networking and Security Business Unit (NSBU), driving the very successful NSX product line. Before Nicira, Steve was the vice president of marketing and interim CEO at Palo Alto Networks. Steve also held executive positions at Blue Coat, Force10, Cisco, Growth Networks, ShoreTel, Bay Networks and SynOptics, and he began his career as a design engineer at GTE Government Systems.
John Jendricks brings more than 35 years of technology leadership experience in driving innovative technologies to become industry-leading companies. For the last two and a half years, John was chief of staff for VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. Prior to VMware, John was vice president of business development and operations at Nicira. John has also held executive positions at Force10 Networks, Juniper, Cisco, Stratacom, Wellfleet and Adobe.
Rod Stuhlmuller brings more than 25 years of product marketing experience with a base of knowledge in cloud, data center and mobile networking, network management and network security. Before joining Aviatrix, Rod was senior director of product marketing for VMware’s NSBU, holding the same role previously at Nicira. Rod has also held product management and marketing roles at Novell, SynOptics, ActivCard and several other network and network security startups.
