Auvik Networks has named Cisco and Extreme Networks veteran Bob Gault its first-ever chief revenue officer.
The hiring, made 10 months after the network management vendor received a $250 million capital infusion from private equity firm Great Hill Partners, is the latest manifestation of a larger campaign to accelerate growth and expand sales to larger MSPs and corporate IT departments.
“Auvik has experienced significant success following the growth investment from Great Hill Partners,” said Marc Morin, Auvik’s CEO, in a media statement. “The addition of a CRO will help create more cross-company opportunities that capture the market in front of us, driving revenue and building a robust channel program. Bob’s proven experience in the industry is exactly the type of leadership we need as we expand into new markets and accelerate our growth trajectory to build a world-class organization.”
Other recent organizational changes at Auvik include the promotions of Susanne Rodriguez (formerly vice president of demand generation) to vice president of marketing and of Jason George (formerly head of global sales and business development) to vice president of sales.
“I am thrilled to join Auvik at this pivotal moment—I firmly believe the organization is aligned with its mission to deliver a remarkable technology management experience,” said Gault in prepared remarks. “It’s scaling into new vertical markets, expanding its product portfolio, and enhancing its direct and indirect sales channels. Pair that with its industry leading end-to-end customer experience and Auvik is on the path to being a global market leader.”
Appointing a CRO is part of a broader effort by Auvik since the Great Hill investment to scale beyond its present-day base among small and midsize MSPs into bigger ones with hundreds of customers and more sophisticated needs.
“We want massive growth,” said an Auvik source to ChannelPro during a recent SMB Forum event in Chicago. “Where that massive growth is going to come from is from large MSPs.”
Last month’s acquisition of MetaGeek, a maker of Wi-Fi management tools, was similarly designed to drive growth by arming Auvik’s network management platform with capabilities critical to both big MSPs and corporate IT departments.
According to Auvik, IT departments have been indirectly fueling growth since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, well before Great Hill entered the picture. “All of these businesses started laying off their IT people and hiring MSPs as a way to save money,” says a source at the company. “The MSP space started growing, and as a result we blew up as well.”
Increased adoption of software- and infrastructure-as-a-service solutions hasn’t impeded that process, he adds. “The path to the cloud is still through the network.”
Auvik’s long-term technical vision is to provide monitoring and management capabilities all along that path, from an endpoint to an access point to a switch to a firewall to the doorstep of a SaaS application.
“If Salesforce isn’t working and it’s past the firewall, we want to be able to tell you why,” Auvik’s source says.
Research published by Auvik late last year documented the evolution of networks in the past two years toward wireless connections and “north-south” traffic between the network and the cloud, versus “east-west” traffic between devices behind the firewall.
Photo: Business Wire
