New president and CEO Smoot has over 30 years’ experience holding top leadership roles, and will look to continue momentum at Riverbed in delivering visibility and performance solutions for networks and applications, anywhere users reside.
Smoot initially joined Riverbed, a Thoma Bravo portfolio company, in 2018 as chief customer officer, and most recently served as COO, leading the organisation’s Worldwide Sales, Channels and Alliances, Sales Operations and Customer Experience teams.
Prior to Riverbed, Smoot spent almost four years at Salesforce, holding the positions of executive vice-president of global partner sales and executive vice-president of market readiness.
In addition, the new Riverbed chief was previously senior vice-president of global customer operations at VMware, 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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“I’m greatly honoured and excited to be Riverbed’s new CEO, and serve thousands of amazing customers worldwide,” said new Riverbed president and CEO, Smoot.
“Riverbed is focused on fuelling 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.”
Robert ‘Tre’ Sayle, Riverbed board member and Thoma Bravo Partner, commented: “Dan has been a stand-out leader at Riverbed and brings tremendous industry experience having held senior leadership roles at some of world’s leading technology companies.
“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.”
Riverbed has history of hiring from within, having promoted Sekhar Kancherlapalli to chief information officer back in November.
