Here are some of the latest executive hirings, promotions, and staff changes. If you’d like SDxCentral to report on your company’s movers and shakers, or if you have a tip about layoffs and restructuring, please send the information to Ali Longwell ([email protected]).

Nutanix President Exits to Serve as Startup CEO

Nutanix President Sudheesh Nair departed the cloud computing company to join former Nutanix co-founder Ajeet Singh at ThoughtSpot as its CEO. ThoughtSpot recently secured $145 million in Series D funding.

Singh left Nutanix in 2012 to form ThoughtSpot, which is building tools for search and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven analytics. Since then, he has served as ThoughtSpot co-founder and CEO, but will relinquish his roles as CEO to Nair and take on the role of executive chairman. In that role, he will lead experience, product, and engineering for the startup.

Nair joined Nutanix in February 2011 as the president, prior to the company’s launch in August of the same year. He helped grow the business’ sales organization and in September 2016 the company went public with a market valuation that exceeded $2 billion. In November of last year, he handed over the sales organization to Nutanix Chief Revenue Officer Lou Attanasio.

CenturyLink SDN VP Exits

CenturyLink's Vice President of SDN and big data Travis Ewert left the company last week. The telco said it did not yet have a candidate to take over Ewert’s duties.

Ewert has not landed anywhere  yet, though he wrote on his LinkedIn profile he is deciding on his next “adventure.”

Ewert is a long-time industry veteran. He joined CenturyLink in 2017 following the acquisition of Level 3, where he had served as the SVP of network software development. And he joined Level 3 when tw telecom was acquired by Level 3 in 2014. Ewert held a number of roles at tw telecom, ultimately as its VP of technology strategy and network technology.

Ariel Dan Promoted to Cloudify CEO

Cloudify named Ariel Dan as its new CEO. Dan joined the cloud automation company as its EVP of Global Sales last May. Dan will succeed Zeev Bikowsky who has served as CEO since Cloudify spun off from GigaSpaces in July of last year. Bikowsky was also the CEO of Gigaspaces.

Dan previously led business operations and information security for Inuit following Inuit’s acquisition of Porticor Cloud Security. Dan co-founded Porticor and served as its executive vice president of sales and marketing. He also held a number of leadership roles at PortAuthority Technologies prior to its acquisition of Websense.

Dan will take over as CEO of Cloudify as the company evolves its product offerings to more cloud-focused consumption and Software-as-Service (SaaS) models.

Movers and Shakers

Former Equinix CEO Steve Smith joined GI Partners. Smith abruptly resigned from Equinix in January following “poor judgement” with an employee matter.

Amdocs CEO and President Eli Gelman will retire in October. He will be replaced by Shuky Sheffer, Amdocs’ SVP and president of its global business group.

Telstra made a number of leadership changes. CFO Warwick Bray, head of technology Stephen Elop, group general counsel Will Irving, Networks Managing Director Mike Wright, and CMO Joe Pollard all left the company. Brendan Riley was named CEO of Telstra InfraCO, Telstra’s infrastructure division; Michael Ebeid was hired to head up its Australian and international business; Nikos Katinakis will join in October as head of Telstra’s networks and IT division; and the company named Maria Tsiaplis as interim global partner team leader; David Burns will lead global business; and Robyn Denholm will serve as CFO and head of strategy. Telstra formed a transformation delivery office, which will be led by Alex Badenoch.

AT&T hired former State Department Chief of Staff Margaret Peterlin as its vice president of global external and public affairs.

HPE made Phil Davis its permanent president of HPE’s new Hybrid IT business group. Davis, the chief sales officer, has been leading this group on an interim basis since the beginning of the year.

MEF elected AT&T Chief Product Officer Roman Pacewicz to its board of directors. MEF also released the complete results of its 2018 to 2019 elections for the board.

Rubrik hired Peter McGoff and Jeff Vijungco to new executive positions. McGoff as the chief legal officer and Vijungco as the chief people officer.

Mary Gardner joined F5 Networks as its chief information security officer.

Big Switch Networks appointed Seamus Hennessy as chief financial officer.

Gigamon added Dave Arkley as chief financial officer and Shane Buckley as president and chief operating officer. Joan Dempsey re-joined the Gigamon’s board of directors, she previously served on the board from 2016 to 2017.

Dan Yerushalmi was appointed head of global sales and strategy of Check Point.

Former BroadSoft VP Cheryl Ragland joined InfoVista as its chief marketing officer.

Fugue named former founder and CEO of webMethods Phillip Merrick as its CEO.

Sysdig promoted Apurva Davé to the role of chief marketing officer. He was formerly the VP of marketing.

AI software provider Moogsoft named Will Cappelli as chief technology office EMEA and global VP of product strategy. Cappelli was formerly a research VP at Gartner.

Synchronoss elected Kris Rinne, a former AT&T network executive, to its board of directors.

Arctic Wolf Networks added Marty Sanders as its first chief security services officer.

Trustwave hired George Tomic, formerly a McAfee VP, as the senior vice president of engineering.

Ex-Citrix Systems executive Nilesh Goradia joined SD-WAN provider Lavelle Networks as director of channel sales and alliances.

Network analytics company Plixer added Paul Piccard as the CTO and SVP of engineering.

Security software provider Eset appointed Brent McCarty president of its North America business.

Ex-Equinix CTO Ihab Tarazi joined Packet as its CTO.

Rahul Kashyap, formerly CTO of Cylance, left his role to start a new startup Awake Security.

Security startup Illumio hired former Obama administration executive Jonathan Reiber as its head of cybersecurity strategy.

James Feger left CenturyLink to become the general manager of F5 Networks' service provider unit.