Ken Laversin, Chief Revenue Officer
Kathleen Swift, Senior Vice President, Human Resources
Rick Valentine, Chief Customer Officer
The company says these executive appointments, which follow a series of regional and channel leadership appointments, will enable Silver Peak to accelerate business expansion and sales through its enterprise and service provider channels, recruit and retain the industry’s best talent and enhance customer engagement, satisfaction and retention as the company pursues market leadership in the hyper-competitive SD-WAN edge infrastructure market.
“We have an enormous opportunity to establish Silver Peak as the SD-WAN market leader, enabling our customers to realise the full transformational promise of the cloud with a self-driving wide area network,” said David Hughes, founder and chief executive officer of Silver Peak. “To be number one, we must move quickly and aggressively to seize the day. Seasoned leaders with proven track records like Ken, Kathleen and Rick will enable us to rapidly expand our go-to-market, scale our organisation and deliver the highest quality of experience to our customers, underscoring our commitment to winning in the market.”
Ken Laversin, a 20-year Silicon Valley veteran, joins Silver Peak as chief revenue officer, leading the global sales, channels and revenue generating teams worldwide. Prior to Silver Peak, Laversin served as senior vice president of worldwide sales and alliances at Jasper Technologies during their hyper-growth phase and subsequent acquisition by Cisco in 2016. At Cisco, Laversin led global IoT software sales for the Cisco Jasper business unit. Laversin began his career in sales roles at Siebel Systems, which was acquired by Oracle In 2006. At Oracle, he served as vice president of North American sales for the company’s BSS/OSS service provider software division. Laversin’s proven experience in scaling global sales teams, coupled with his knowledge of successfully executing go-to-market partnerships within the communications service provider market, will help Silver Peak to accelerate revenue growth and expand the company’s global SD-WAN leadership position. Laversin holds a bachelor of science degree in economics and political science from the University of Arizona.
“Silver Peak is on an amazing growth trajectory as an early leader in the SD-WAN market and I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to lead the company’s global sales and channels teams forward,” said Ken Laversin, chief revenue officer at Silver Peak. “To fuel business expansion, I will initially focus on four key areas; expanding service provider partnerships and go-to-market initiatives, doubling the global sales and channel organisations by hiring the best and brightest people, standardising sales processes and accelerating global partner programmes and enablement.”
Kathleen Swift joins Silver Peak as senior vice president of human resources, leading all aspects of talent acquisition, organisational development, total rewards, employee engagement and retention. Previously, Swift served as vice president of global human resources for Ruckus Wireless. Prior to joining Ruckus, Swift served as the vice president of human resources at Complete Genomics, Opnext, Extreme Networks and Terayon. Swift also served in human resources roles at Avanex, Com21, Questlink and Hitachi. Swift holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration with honors from the California State University at Chico and spent a year studying overseas at Lincoln University in New Zealand.
“With nearly 100 active job openings across the organisation, my initial focus will be attracting, developing and retaining the best and brightest talent in the industry to scale Silver Peak in line with demands of our growth,” said Kathleen Swift, senior vice president of human resources at Silver Peak. “Our long-term success will also depend on staying true to our cultural values of being approachable, humble, and knowing that we’re at our best when we’re rethinking the possible and delivering on our promise to customers to seamlessly connect people to applications.”
Rick Valentine joins Silver Peak as chief customer officer, leading all aspects of customer success, satisfaction and retention, currently representing more than 3,000 customers around the world. Prior to Silver Peak, Valentine served as chief customer officer at Symantec Inc./Veritas Software leading customer success for the technical support software portfolio spanning consumer and enterprise customers across 11 global locations and 15+ languages, including a team of 1,500 worldwide associates. Prior to that, Valentine served as general manager of employee management solutions at Intuit and vice president and general manager of Sage SaaS and Cloud services at Sage Software. Earlier, Valentine served in various executive assignments at Major Account Payroll Service, National Account Services and ADP. Valentine is a Certified Public Accountant and holds a Bachelor of Arts from Miami University.
“Rarely does a company benefit from a trifecta of having the right technology at the right time in the market and the right customers ready to embrace the cloud and transform the way they connect people to applications,” said Rick Valentine, chief customer officer at Silver Peak. “Silver Peak is in an enviable position in the SD-WAN market and my focus will be on making it as easy as possible for customers to do business with us and ensuring that we deliver the highest quality of customer experience in the industry. The success of our customers is our number-one business priority.”