Alex Thurber SVP Customer Success and Channel Strategy, Virtana

Virtana, Inc. announced that Alex Thurber has been appointed SVP of customer cuccess and channel strategy.

The announcement follows last week’s news of the recently appointed VP of Product Management, and the product announcement last December of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based Virtana Platform, an unified observability platform for migrating, optimizing, monitoring, and managing application workloads with flexible consumption across public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
 
He brings 20+ years of international experience, with ae background in customer-facing and channel strategy roles in software companies transforming to SaaS. Most recently, he served as chief revenue officer at Pulse Secure, a SaaS-based secure access software company. He was responsible for all field operations and revenue-generating activities, and helped accelerate the business that led to its sale in December 2020. 
 
Before that, he was SVP and GM of the mobility solutions business unit for BlackBerry, Ltd. He was specifically responsible for the development, licensing, and support of its secure Android software. Prior to that, he held executive channel strategy and field operations roles at WatchGuard, Tripwire, and McAfee. He also spent 10 years at Cisco leading channel strategy for a number of its technologies, where he co-developed a new rebate-based channel profitability program (VIP program), still in effect more than a decade later.

He holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from Knox College and has been a licensed pilot since he was 16.
 
Kash Shaikh, president and CEO, said: “At Virtana, we are seeing accelerated momentum in our overall business including cloud migration solutions as we continue to guide our customers with a ‘know before you go’ approach. Alex’s experience of guiding customer’s journeys to SaaS and hybrid cloud in small and large companies is very beneficial for us-as the success of our customers is increasingly intertwined with the success of our company as we continue to expand our cloud business.“
 
He noted: “Our Global 2000 customers have started benefiting from the high-fidelity data needed to plan and optimize their hybrid cloud migrations and reduce their cloud costs by 20% or more. Couple this with our channel-first initiative to reach more customers, and we see a huge growth opportunity. Now we look forward to our customers and channel partners benefiting from Alex’s vision, perspective, and leadership.“
 
Thurber said: “Learning about Virtana and their ‘know before you go’ guidance immediately made me think about being a pilot. Before you take off, you need to have a flight plan, know the weather, balance your weight/load, and more. Once you’re in the air, there is no turning back. As companies migrate to hybrid and multi-cloud environments, we are giving them a clear flight plan with no regrets once they take off.”
 
He continued: “Enterprise customers are at a critical inflection point, where the pandemic accelerated many cloud migrations. The question is now how to help them succeed with cloud migrations. What impressed me about Virtana were 2 things: first, the incredible customer base and their deep understanding of on-premises and cloud environments and second, their unified observability SaaS platform-this unique combination makes us a powerhouse for seamless migrations.  And, once we execute on that, it’s a smooth flight from there to customer success. To say this is exciting is an understatement.”
 
As he noted, many companies are shifting to the public cloud out of necessity, which often means too quickly and without proper planning. This trend was recently confirmed in a survey of 350 IT decision makers and revealed that 95% of enterprises say they have moved some applications to the cloud, but not without difficulty. 72% of the enterprises surveyed had to move one or more of their migrated applications or workloads back on-premises. Not every workload works best in the cloud; organizations need to choose the best environment for each application workload to optimize their efforts.
 
To solve these challenges, organizations need a single observability platform for hybrid IT digital operations, including Infrastructure Performance Monitoring (ITOM), AI for IT Operations, Cloud Financial Management, and cloud migration segments, with flexible consumption both on-premises and in the public cloud. Virtana Platform is simplifying the complexity of hybrid IT environments with a single cloud-agnostic platform across all of these segment categories. The $30 billion ITOM software market is ripe for disruption, and Virtana is well positioned in his business.
 
Shaikh also noted: “The simplicity we provide with Virtana’s SaaS platform, IT professionals also do not need to worry about the sprawl of disconnected, duct-taped point tools. We are simplifying the complexity of hybrid IT environments so our customers can accelerate their digital transformation efforts. Our hard work has already started to pay off, Virtana was recently named one of the coolest cloud companies by CRN and a top 10 player keeping public cloud costs under control by Business Insider.”