Riverbed appoints Dan Smoot as president and CEO

Dan Smoot has been appointed as President and CEO of Riverbed in order to drive the Company’s next phase of growth.

Riverbed today announced the appointment of Dan Smoot to President and CEO to drive the Company’s next phase of growth, and continue its momentum in delivering industry-leading visibility and performance solutions for networks and applications, anywhere users reside. Smoot, who has more than 30 years of experience holding top leadership roles including at Salesforce, Cisco and VMware, joined Riverbed in June 2018. At Riverbed, he has held several executive leadership roles, including most recently COO and leading the company’s Worldwide Sales, Channels and Alliances, Sales Operations and Customer Experience teams.

“Dan has been a stand-out leader at Riverbed and brings tremendous industry experience having held senior leadership roles at some of the world’s leading technology companies,” said Robert ‘Tre’ Sayle, Riverbed Board Member and Thoma Bravo Partner (Riverbed is a portfolio company of Thoma Bravo). “Dan has an unwavering commitment to Riverbed’s customers and partners, an exceptional track record driving operational excellence and business results, and is a strong leader of people and culture. Dan is the right leader to take Riverbed to the next level and drive profitable growth for our business and continued innovation to support customers and partners. I also want to thank our previous CEO, Rich McBee, who helped lead Riverbed during a critical time, including setting a strong foundation for the future and navigating the Company through a global pandemic.”

“I’m greatly honoured and excited to be Riverbed’s new CEO, and serve thousands of amazing customers worldwide,” said Dan Smoot, President and CEO. “Riverbed is focused on fueling our next phase of growth by delivering innovative and relevant technologies that help propel our customers’ businesses and enable them to fully capitalise on their digital and IT investments. With leading end-to-end visibility and performance solutions, Riverbed is in a unique position to help business and government organisations as they modernise and secure their networks, accelerate cloud and SaaS migrations, and advance hybrid work environments as employees increasingly work-from-anywhere.”

Smoot was previously Executive Vice President of Global Partner Sales at Salesforce, managing the Worldwide Partner Sales organisation. He was also Executive Vice President of Market Readiness at Salesforce, where he created a global organisation to deliver critical go-to-market operations. Prior to Salesforce, Smoot worked at VMware as Senior Vice President of Global Customer Operations, overseeing advanced technology sales, global services, renewals, global channels and alliances, OEM/ISV sales and go-to-mark strategy. Before VMware, he spent more than 12 years in a variety of senior leadership roles at Cisco.

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About Riverbed

Riverbed enables organisations to maximise performance and visibility for networks and applications, so they can overcome complexity and fully capitalise on their digital and cloud investments. The Riverbed Network and Application Performance Platform enables organisations to visualise, optimise, remediate and accelerate the performance of any network for any application and helps to identify and mitigate cybersecurity threats. The platform addresses performance and visibility holistically with best-in-class WAN optimisation, unified network performance management (NPM), application acceleration (including Office 365, SaaS, client and cloud acceleration), and enterprise-grade SD-WAN. Riverbed’s 30,000+ customers include 99% of the Fortune 100. Learn more at riverbed.com.

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