Silver Peak aims to speed up growth with trio of new senior executive hires

SD-WAN specialist Silver Peak has announced three key senior executive appointments to help steer the company through its next phase of growth and expansion. The new hires include:

  • Ken Laversin, Chief Revenue Officer
  • Kathleen Swift, Senior Vice President, Human Resources
  • Rick Valentine, Chief Customer Officer

Silver Peak said the appointments, in the wake of a recent series of regional and channel leadership hires, will enable it to speed up business expansion through its enterprise and service provider channels, as well as recruit and retain talent and boost customer engagement, satisfaction and retention.

“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 CEO 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.”

0 (19)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.

0 (20)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.

0 (21)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.

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