There’s been a lot of chaos and opportunity in the networking world over the past few years, as companies shift from hardware-oriented networking to using software to manage their networking infrastructure. Seattle’s AppViewX is one of many companies chasing this new market, and new CEO Ryan Windham thinks his new company is on the right path.
Windham takes over for Manny Rivelo, the former F5 Networks CEO who had been running the company since it started life under another entity called Payoda in 2016. He declined to comment on the exact circumstances of Rivelo’s departure, but noted that Rivelo remains engaged with the company as an advisor, and Rivelo’s LinkedIn profile says he’s still on the board of directors.
Rivelo became chief sales officer at another networking company, Arista Networks, in January 2018. And at some point earlier this year, Payoda founder and CEO Anand Purushothaman took over as CEO for AppViewX as a transition leader between Rivelo and Windham, who was wrapping up his time at Portland-based Cedexis after selling that company to Citrix in February. And illustrating the small world of networking technology, Windham spent three years at F5 before heading to Cedexis.
All of these companies are shifting over to a world in which networking infrastructure is increasingly being managed by software, a trend that long ago took over many parts of the data center but has been a little slower to impact the networking world outside of the big cloud companies. A lot of basic networking equipment is still being configured manually, Windham said, and that’s causing “an infrastructure bottleneck” as companies push their tech departments to move faster.
“Many enterprises that we encounter are still managing those configurations in a spreadsheet,” he said, and that’s not going to work for much longer. AppViewX, which is profitable, has been seeing demand for its CERT+ digital certificate management product and its AUTOMATION+ product, which manages service requests for networking capacity, he said.
