Sujal Patel Board’s Director, ExtraHop

ExtraHop Networks, Inc., provider of network-based application performance management solutions, announced that Isilon Systems founder Sujal Patel has joined the company’s Board of Directors, and former Isilon sales executive Eric Scollard has been appointed Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales.

With the launch of Isilon in 2001, Patel brought groundbreaking technical innovation to the enterprise storage market while Scollard led the Isilon Sales organisation from pre-revenue to nearly $100 million annually. The company’s growth resulted in the hottest technology IPO of 2006 and helped lay the foundation for a $2.25 billion acquisition by storage industry giant EMC in late 2010. Patel and Scollard come to ExtraHop on the heels of significant corporate growth achievements, including the company’s recent EMEA expansion and industry innovation recognition.

 Sujal Patel is the founder of Isilon and is recognized for pioneering scale-out storage as a technical architecture and creating this new sector of the enterprise storage market. He has served as President and Chief Executive Officer since October 2007. He served as Isilon’s Chief Technology Officer from 2001 to March 2008 and as President and Chief Executive Officer from the founding of Isilon in 2001 until August 2003. From 1996 to 2001, he served in various engineering roles at RealNetworks, Inc., in part as chief architect behind the company’s second-generation core media delivery system. Sujal holds a number of patents and pending patents, including those for the Isilon OneFS distributed file system. Sujal holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park.

"Application performance management is at an inflection point," said Patel. "Applications have traditionally been designed for a static datacenter and structured content, leading to an inflexible approach to APM. Today, those critical business applications are developed in a fundamentally different way and deployed across decidedly heterogeneous and dynamic environments. Simply bolting on new technologies to legacy solutions will not solve the problems that are growing in the enterprise datacenter. There is a tremendous opportunity for a completely new approach to APM similar to the way that the scale-out storage architecture we pioneered at Isilon has begun to revolutionise the enterprise storage market. I am very excited to help ExtraHop execute against that vision."

"ExtraHop brings disruptive innovation to APM in much the same way that we at Isilon helped to redefine enterprise storage," said Scollard. "Today’s increasingly complex applications demand an APM solution built from the ground up to ensure that business-critical transactions do not fail. Incumbent APM vendors can add on acquired technology, but the fact remains that those core solutions are built on a decades-old technology architecture. ExtraHop’s industry-changing approach is the reason Sujal and I joined the company, and we look forward to making big things happen with this exciting technology and team."

ExtraHop saw momentum in 2011, gaining traction in the EMEA market, seeing strong sales growth among both new and existing customers, and receiving recognition from Gartner as an APM Innovator. The company doubled its employee headcount and released seven product enhancements, including a virtual appliance, Application Inspection Triggers technology, real-time 2048-bit SSL decryption, and real-time protocol analysis for memcached, AMF, Oracle databases, and IBM DB2 databases.

"The valuable experience that Sujal and Eric bring to ExtraHop will help us better understand and anticipate customer needs and optimise the way that we take our products to market," said Jesse Rothstein, ExtraHop co-founder and CEO. "Much as our products are the right solution at the right time for our customers, Sujal and Eric’s commitment to our success comes at just the right time in ExtraHop’s growth trajectory. I am confident that they will help to maximise the opportunity we have to deliver our unique and highly differentiated network-based APM solutions to customers across the globe."