Management, orchestration, and automation company AppViewX named former Cedexis CEO and F5 executive Ryan Windham as CEO.

In January, AppViewX had named founder and CEO of Payoda Anand Purusothaman as its CEO. Payoda was founded by AppViewX but spun out as its own entity in April 2016. According to the company, Purusothaman was standing in as CEO while Windham dealt with the acquisition of Cedexis, an application delivery startup. Cedexis was bought by Citrix in February.

Purusothaman, and now Windham, succeeded Manuel Rivelo, who had been CEO since 2016. Both Rivelo and Purusothaman will continue to serve on AppViewX’s board of directors with Purusothaman as its chairman.

AppViewX provides technology for network and security operations (NetOps and SecOps) that manages, automates, and orchestrates network services in brownfield and greenfield data centers and greenfield cloud deployments.

[caption id="attachment_67149" align="alignright" width="200"] Ryan Windham[/caption]

According to Windham, “that pain is very well known to me,” as he began his career as a network engineer and systems administrator. As NetOps and SecOps teams are pushed to move faster and support greater business agility, many don’t have the tools to address the bottleneck that emerges, he said: “That’s where we [AppViewX] come into play.”

When asked what’s next, Windham said he expects to spend the first 30 to 60 days “listening and learning,” but that he expects focus to be on its digital certificate management and automation product Cert+, which has seen “a ton of growth over the past 12 months.”

“I think it’s [the growth has] been driven by architecture change like microservices, all these IoT devices, and just the general trend toward encrypted traffic,” said Windham. “What we’ve seen is we have a competitive product in the space, and we’re starting to see some big wins. So what I’m trying to do right out of the gate is invest much more heavily in our go-to-market motion for this product, especially in the U.S., where we’re seeing most of the traction.”

Windham remained optimistic about the prospects of AppViewX’s tools to leverage automation in infrastructure lifecycle management. He said that in the coming months its revenue would be driven by Cert+ automation, and updates to its namesake network infrastructure management and automation platform will focus on increasing its functionality and making it more context-aware and user friendly.

Main image courtesy of yurolaitsalbert / 123RF Stock Photo