Seasoned tech sales leader to oversee expansion of company’s global sales force

Aryaka®, the leading WAN as-a-Service company, announced today that Jim Hilbert will join the company’s leadership team as Senior Vice President of Global Sales. Mr. Hilbert will oversee the expansion of Aryaka’s sales team during a time of rapid growth.

Mr. Hilbert is a respected executive with 30 years of sales, strategy, and execution expertise in fast-paced, innovative technology companies. Mr. Hilbert has led sales and driven revenue growth at a number of technology companies, including IBM, EMC, Rackspace, and most recently, FireHost. With an extensive background in cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and go-to-market execution, Hilbert will help accelerate Aryaka’s expansion into Asia-Pacific and EMEA, while also continuing to build on rapid growth in the Americas.

“Jim Hilbert has been building successful, goal-oriented sales teams for more than 30 years,” said Ram Gupta, Executive Chairman of Aryaka. “His extensive experience in the cloud computing market will be invaluable during this next stage of growth for Aryaka. We are honored to welcome Jim to our senior executive team, and we’re excited to have him in our corner as we continue to redefine the enterprise networking landscape.”

Aryaka recently secured $16 million in additional funding, led by Nexus Venture Partners and joined by existing investors Trinity Ventures, InterWest Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Presidio Ventures. The majority of the funding will be used to scale Aryaka’s global sales infrastructure in response to rapidly growing demand for its family of WAN, CDN, and Application Acceleration as-a-Service offerings. These intelligent services bypass the public Internet, enabling customers to achieve faster, more stable, and lower-cost global access to cloud data and services.

“I am looking forward to helping Aryaka continue to expand and dominate a market that it invented in the first place: the WAN as-a-Service market. As more startups enter the space, they’ll soon realize that Aryaka’s experience, its private global network, and its enthusiastic customer base are difficult to compete against,” Hilbert said.

Before joining Aryaka, Jim served as SVP of Global Sales and Business Development for FireHost, a secure cloud hosting company. While at FireHost, he was responsible for global customer acquisition, revenue, and customer satisfaction, and he helped FireHost position itself as one of the most innovative companies in the Managed Cloud industry. Before that, Jim served as the East Area Sales Leader for Rackspace (NYSE: RAX), delivering hybrid cloud solutions for Fortune 1000 clients.

Some other highlights of his career include serving as: CSO/Co-Founder at Cloud Harbor; VP of Sales at Cordys (now OpenText); VP of Sales at Appian; VP of Open Software at EMC (NYSE: EMC); SVP of Global Sales and Channels at Asera Corporation; and SVP of Global Sales at both Epic Realm and Support Soft, the latter of which he helped guide to an IPO (NASD: SPRT). Jim started his sales career with Amdahl Corporation, where he rose up to the level of VP Marketing, Open Systems before joining Tivoli (later acquired by IBM) as the GM of the Storage Software global business unit.

About Aryaka
Aryaka is transforming how global enterprises connect sites and users worldwide, and use mission-critical applications to support modern business execution demands. Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN combines a purpose-built private network, SD-WAN, optimization and acceleration techniques, connectivity to cloud platforms, and network visibility in a single solution that is delivered as a service.

To learn more, visit www.aryaka.com. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.