Panzura was co-founded and funded by a team of engineers and venture capitalists with over ten years of working experience and success together. Before Panzura, they developed the core security and performance technology at wireless networking leader Aruba Networks, and the application delivery technology in Alteon WebSystem’s Layer 4-7 switching products. Today, Aruba is a public company (NASDAQ: ARUN) and Alteon was acquired by Nortel for $7.8B.
Randy Chou, Co-founder & CEO
Randy’s experience spans 15 years of technical and management leadership in the security, networking, and application acceleration fields. Prior to co-founding Panzura, Randy was a member of the founding software team at Aruba Networks, where he managed the architecture and development of the company’s security software. The combination of his technical expertise and business acumen helped Aruba become the leader in the enterprise Wi-Fi security market. Prior to Aruba Networks, Randy led the development of SSL security and load balancing software at Alteon WebSystems. Randy holds a degree in computer science from UC Berkeley.
John Taylor, Co-founder & CTO
John built his career in software development and engineering management in the computer and networking security industries. His work is the foundation behind leading ATM switching, web acceleration, and Wi-Fi products. John has a reputation for growing start-ups into publicly traded companies. Before co-founding Panzura, John was a member of the founding software team at Aruba Networks, where he served as Director of Engineering. Prior to Aruba Networks, John was a lead software architect and engineer at Alteon WebSystems, playing an instrumental role in the creation of the load-balancing market. At FORE Systems, John was a software engineer before the company began trading publicly in 1994. John completed his master’s degree in computer science at the University of Virginia.
Michael Morgan, CFO
Michael Morgan has more than 20 years of experience in managing all aspects of finance and administration for private and publicly held technology companies, building companies from start up through IPO and leading M&A transactions on both the buy and the sell side. Prior to Panzura, he served as CFO at Model N, where he built out a worldwide finance and administration team and helped guide the company to profitability during a period of significant growth in both revenue and employees. Prior to Model N, he served as CFO at Skybox Security, where he raised several rounds of venture financing and scaled the company’s financial systems and corporate infrastructure as they rapidly grew. Before Skybox, Michael was CFO at BackWeb Technologies (Nasdaq: BWEB), a publicly traded provider of technologies and solutions for massively scalable Web synchronization technologies. Michael was also CFO at Talarian Corp., where he orchestrated their successful IPO and led their acquisition by Tibco (Nasdaq: TIBX). Prior to Talarian, Michael was CFO and board member at Enlighten Software Solutions, where as one of the two original executives he managed their successful IPO and secondary offering. Michael spent the first six years of his career gaining financial and operations consulting experience as a manager with KPMG Peat Marwick, LLP. He is a CPA and holds a BS from San Jose State University.
Rich Weber, VP of Product Management and Operations
With over 20 years of experience in the enterprise software, networking and storage industries, Rich is a hands-on manager of product management, IT and operations teams. Rich has also previously held Director and VP-level roles in product management and operations. Before joining Panzura, Rich was VP of Operations at Opvista and prior to that ran operations at Wi-Fi infrastructure provider Trapeze Networks, which was acquired by Belden in 2008.
Shyam Desirazu, VP of Engineering
Shyam has over 20 years’ software development and management experience across a broad spectrum of the computer industry including caching, storage, networking and social media. He was most recently at Zynga, where as a Senior Director of Engineering he played key roles in the Zynga Platform team and in the Hidden Chronicles and Poker Game Studios. Prior to that, he was a Senior Director at Bytemobile, a wireless optimization startup that was acquired by Citrix in 2012. Before Bytemobile, he served in various management positions at NetApp where he was responsible for the development of data storage and caching products. While at NetApp, he also spent a year in India starting up and growing NetApp India Engineering, a strategic initiative for the company’s global software development effort. His early career has included key development roles at Akamai, SGI and Sun Microsystems. Shyam holds a B.Tech in Engineering from IIT Madras and an MS in Computer Science from SUNY Buffalo.
Jeff Herr, VP of Sales, North America
Jeff has over 30 years of enterprise storage sales experience and has run highly successful sales teams. Early on, he was one of NetApp’s first Area Sales Directors and helped grow the company from its infancy. More recently, Jeff served as Director of Cloud Alliances at Riverbed Technology, overseeing the growth of their cloud strategy. Jeff has also held various sales executive positions at Scalent, Index Engines, and NuView. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Iowa State University.
Diptish Datta, VP of Technical Services
Diptish brings over 25 years of technical leadership experience in the computer networking and storage industry. His passion is customer support and services with a focus on automation and process improvement. Most recently, Diptish led customer operations at Gridiron Systems where he built and managed all customer-facing functions and led the strategy and implementation of back-end data mining and alerting tools. Prior to that, Diptish served as VP of services engineering at NetApp where he was the pioneer and executive champion for the development of the remote support technology and infrastructure. Diptish holds a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech and a Bachelor’s degree from IIT in India.
Ranajit Nevatia, VP of Marketing
Ranajit brings over 15 years’ experience in enterprise storage and software. Prior to Panzura, Ranajit was responsible for business strategy, cloud alliances, product management and marketing for Riverbed’s Cloud Storage Business Unit. Previously, Ranajit held leadership positions with Asempra, VERITAS (acquired by Symantec), and Oracle Corporation. Ranajit holds an AA degree in business from Schiller University (Switzerland), a BS in mathematics from Morehouse College, and an MBA from Santa Clara University.
Jim Thayer, VP of Channels and Business Development
Jim has over 20 years of successful sales and sales leadership experience, in storage, software and telecommunication. For the past decade Jim worked for NetApp and lead teams that covered some of NetApp most strategic accounts. He was part of a team that that was instrumental in helping NetApp to transform to meet the needs of Enterprise customers. At NetApp, Jim worked in the recently formed Cloud and Service Provider Sales Organization where he built and lead the team that covers the western United States. Prior to that Jim built and lead teams at several startups and spent about 10 years in the telecom space. Jim holds a degree a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and Management Information Systems from Old Dominion University.
Al Sadler, VP of Operations
Specializing in the building and managing of high-growth organizations, Al Sadler brings 35 years of experience with Fortune 500 companies and Silicon Valley startups to Panzura as VP of Operations. Formerly VP of Operations at CloudShield Technologies and OpVista, Sadler has also served in executive positions at multiple public and private companies across the enterprise technology landscape, including COO at Trapeze Networks and Alidian Networks.
