Our Executive Leadership Team

Kash Shaikh, President and CEO – LinkedIn
 

Kash Shaikh is President, Chief Executive Officer, and member Board of Directors at Virtana. He has more than 25 years of experience in the data center and the cloud industry. Kash has a track record of improving results in small and large fortune 100 public companies by making necessary strategic calls to drive profitable organic and inorganic growth.

Prior to Virtana, Shaikh was Global Vice President and General Manager of Solutions business at Dell Technologies, which included technology partner alliances. Under his leadership, this Solutions business grew by 28% to $1.77B. Before Dell, Shaikh held executive and leadership roles at public companies, including Ruckus Wireless, Riverbed Technologies, Hewlett Packard, Cisco, and Nortel Networks. Kash also serves as a Board Member of Ignited, a non-profit that provides learning opportunities around STEM for teachers.

Kash holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from NED University, a master’s in Electrical Engineering from Wichita State University, and an MBA from Boise State University.

Connect with Shaikh for real-time industry insight on LinkedIn and Twitter

Marion Smith, CFO – LinkedIn
 

Marion joined Virtana as CFO, with over 20 years of senior management and start-up experience, serving in executive roles from early stage through exit, including IPO and acquisitions. He has a passion for high-growth, disruptive, technology-driven ventures, and has held key leadership roles in seven startups. Marion’s successful track record includes his contributions to strong leadership teams, focused on effective business management and enterprise growth.

Marion most recently served as CFO for Hazelcast, successfully raising over $50M in equity and debt, while building out a full business team. He joined Hazelcast from Pulse Secure where he served as VP & GM of the company’s vADC Business Unit, overseeing all aspects of strategy, execution, and GTM with P&L responsibility for the company’s global vADC business.

Marion’s leadership has enhanced the success of Brocade Communications, Renewvia Energy, Micron Misting, and e-lingo. He was also part of the founding team at internet pioneer Inktomi, helping build the company from start-up to one of the most successful IPOs of the late 90’s. Marion holds a BS in Economics from Georgia State University and serves in advisory roles at several tech companies.

Michelle Padron, VP of Human Resources – LinkedIn
 

Michelle is a multi-faceted HR professional with over 20 years of experience developing people programs. As VP of Human Resources for Virtana, she is passionate about fostering an environment where team members are heard and valued. Michelle has a practical, partner-centric approach to finding solutions that align with the company culture. Her toolbox includes talent development and management, total rewards and HR business partner work – including acquisitions, mergers, and divestitures. She has cultivated these skills while working in the semiconductor, networking, and cloud technology industries for companies including Marvell, Brocade Communications, and Altera.

John Gentry, CTO – LinkedIn
 

As CTO & SVP of Business Development, John is responsible for being the voice of the customer and understanding the key IT industry trends that affect product strategy and strategic alliances. John brings over 20 years of IT industry experience and has held a number of senior level sales, sales engineering and marketing positions at industry leaders such as Qlogic, McData, CNT and Borland. John was a double major in Economics and Sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Christina Richards, CMO – LinkedIn
 

As the Chief Marketing Officer for Virtana, Christina Richards brings 25 years of marketing, engineering, and revenue-acceleration experience to Virtana to help fuel its next phase of growth. Christina owns the overall marketing strategy for Virtana including corporate marketing, brand strategy, product marketing, and demand generation.

Prior to joining Virtana, she served in Marketing and Business Development leadership roles at Silicon Valley startups like Aeris and AOptix, as well as large global firm Nortel Networks. Christina earned her B.S. Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech, and her MBA from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

Erich Elit, VP of WW Sales – LinkedIn
 

Erich Elit is a high performing information technology executive with a proven track record leading highly effective and successful sales teams. With over 25 years of experience, spanning large global enterprises to technology start-ups, he focuses on driving exceptional customer experiences and outcomes while consistently delivering business results.

Erich is currently the VP of Worldwide Sales for Virtana. For the last 11 years he has driven sales and new customer acquisition for the hybrid IT leader. His scope has ranged from territory and regional levels to the worldwide markets including sales, channel, and solutions consulting in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific. During his role as RVP of Central Region Sales, his team took top honors three years running by overachieving sales and new customer goals.

Prior to Virtana, Erich held leadership roles at Brocade Communication, McData and CNT where he leveraged his deep data center operations knowledge to help drive new solutions and innovations with IBM Global Services and many others while successfully merging teams through three acquisitions.

Erich lives in Colorado with his wife Mendie and has 6 grown children. When not juggling the work-life balance, you will likely find him on a remote trail deep in mountains riding off-road motorcycles.

Alex Thurber, SVP, Customer Success and Channel Strategy – LinkedIn
 

Alex is responsible for Global Customer Success. This new organization includes professional services, strategic support, and technical support teams. In this relationship-focused customer management role, Alex is responsible for leading the strategy, development, and delivery of Virtana’s global customer relationships. In addition, Alex owns Channel Strategy.

Alex has an extensive background in customer-facing and channel strategy roles in software companies transforming to SaaS. Before Virtana, Alex was Chief Revenue Officer of Pulse Secure, a SaaS-based secure access software company. Before Pulse, Alex was Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Mobility Solutions business unit for BlackBerry, Ltd. Prior to BlackBerry, Alex held executive channel strategy and field operations roles at WatchGuard, Tripwire, and McAfee. Alex also spent ten years at Cisco leading channel strategy for advanced technologies, where he co-developed the new rebate-based channel profitability program (VIP program), which is still in effect more than a decade later.

Alex has spent many years living outside the United States and has a BA in International Relations from Knox College. Alex is active in civic affairs and has been a licensed pilot since he was 16.

Jon Cyr – VP, Product Management – LinkedIn
 

Jonathan (Jon) Cyr is responsible for Product Management at Virtana. In this role, Jon owns the overall strategy and product direction of the Virtana portfolio of IT Operations Management (ITOM) products. In addition, Jon also leads the Product and Technology Enablement team.

Jon brings twenty-plus years’ experience in architecting enterprise solutions for the ITOM market. Recently, his focus has been on hybrid cloud and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) services, primarily at Dell EMC and John Hancock. Prior to Dell EMC, he spent 14 years at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise in product line management and customer success, delivering solutions for the ITOM Software market.

Jon served for more than 11 years in the Connecticut Army National Guard, where he supported domestic and international relief missions. During his time in the Army National Guard, he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Connecticut School of Business, and subsequently an MBA from Sacred Heart University.

Randy Randhawa, SVP Engineering – LinkedIn
 

Satyajeet (Randy) Randhawa is Senior Vice President of Product Development & Support at Virtana. He leads all aspects of development, testing, devops, support and cloud operations for Virtana’s products. During this role, Randy created a new engineering process and organizational structure to decouple development from product delivery, supporting flexible consumption as an appliance, enterprise software, or SaaS.

Over the past two years, Randy has worked closely with both customers and field teams to prioritize features, define the roadmap, and incubate a new product for hybrid infrastructure optimization, focused on cloud migration and asset management. Prior to joining Virtana, Randy was Co-Founder and Vice President of Engineering at Lumina Networks where he worked with leading service providers to build network automation and orchestration. Randy has also held engineering and leadership positions at Brocade Communications, Cisco Systems, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Resilience Corp and Rainfinity. Randy is a seasoned technology and business leader with more than 20 years of experience building and scaling teams, and a strong belief in team empowerment and leading by example.