MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — (Marketwired) — 08/05/15 — VeloCloud Networks Inc., a cloud networking company, today announced the appointments of three Silicon Valley veterans to its executive team: Michael Wood, vice president of marketing; Ron Longo, vice president of business development; and Mark Thorpe, vice president and head of finance and administration. All three executives report to Sanjay Uppal, CEO and co-founder of VeloCloud.
“Filling these key executive positions is another important milestone in our goal to become the SD-WAN technology provider of choice for distributed enterprises globally,” said Uppal. “The fact that we have attracted such stellar executives to join our team speaks volumes about VeloCloud–s reputation in the industry and about our prospects for the future.”
Wood comes to VeloCloud with more than 20 years of leadership and management experience in the networking industry. Most recently, Wood served as VP of product management and marketing for Akamai Technologies– Cloud Networking Business Unit, driving both product management and marketing activities while establishing a new product category and market. He also was an executive in residence, and is currently an advisor, for Plug and Play Tech Center, a startup incubator and accelerator. Early in his career, Wood was with StrataCom as a senior member of the technical staff designing, building and architecting networking products. After Cisco acquired StrataCom in 1996, Wood spent 15 years with Cisco in various positions, culminating in the director of product management and marketing role for the multi-billion dollar branch office integrated services router business for enterprises and service providers. Wood has a master–s degree in electrical engineering and a bachelor–s degree in industrial technology from San Jose State University.
“VeloCloud is the leader in cloud-delivered SD-WAN and is poised to drive dramatic transformation for enterprises and service providers around the world in this $45B market,” said Wood. “VeloCloud is in the right place with the right solution at the right time.”
Longo is a senior executive with more than 15 years of experience at major publicly traded companies, as well as at early stage, privately held companies. Prior to joining VeloCloud, Longo was the vice president of North America for OnMobile where he managed the overall sales and operations of the company–s newest market. He arrived at OnMobile through the acquisition of Dilithium, where he served as the senior vice president of sales and marketing selling to Tier 1 worldwide service providers. Prior to Dilithium, Longo was an early stage entrepreneur and operating executive for venture-backed Red Condor and Mahi Networks, both of which were acquired. Before joining Mahi Networks, Longo was the worldwide vice president of marketing at Advanced Fibre Communication (AFC), which was acquired by Tellabs. Longo was recruited by AFC from Adtran, where he ran the company–s technical support and product qualification organization. He started his career as an engineer at BellSouth, and received his BSEE degree from the University of Alabama.
Thorpe oversees finance, accounting, legal, facilities and administrative areas in support of VeloCloud–s organic growth and development. He is an accomplished financial executive with more than 20 years of experience in finance, accounting, strategy, and mergers and acquisitions. Prior to VeloCloud, Thorpe helped to lead M&A and corporate business development at ServiceSource, Inc., a cloud and SaaS provider for Global 1000 and Fortune 500 companies. An initial member of Citrix–s M&A team, he helped to transform Citrix into a leader in virtualization, mobility management, networking, and SaaS solutions; and grow revenues from $500 million to more than $2 billion. Thorpe began his career at KPMG providing audit and accounting services to privately held and publicly traded companies, and M&A and Transaction Advisory Services. He holds dual master–s and bachelor–s accounting degrees from the University of Florida. He is also a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and a member of the AICPA.
VeloCloud, the cloud-delivered SD-WAN company, simplifies branch WAN networking by automating deployment and improving performance over private, broadband Internet and LTE links for today–s increasingly distributed enterprises. VeloCloud was the winner of this year–s Best Startup of Interop Award and IT World Startup of the Year Award, and is also a Red Herring North America Top 100 company. VeloCloud is the first to provide all three elements needed to achieve a cloud-delivered SD-WAN: a cloud network for enterprise-grade connection to cloud and enterprise applications; software-defined control and automation; and virtual services delivery. VeloCloud has received financing from investors including The Fabric, NEA and Venrock. VeloCloud has its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., with a development center in Chennai, India. For more information, visit and follow the company on Twitter .
VeloCloud is a registered trademark of VeloCloud, Inc., in the United States and other countries. All other brands, products, or service names are or may be trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Dan Spalding
(408) 960-9297
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