Menlo Park, California – US: Apstra Inc. said that Michael Wood has joined the company as chief marketing officer (CMO) and will head up all marketing and product efforts for the company. Wood is a seasoned strategic leader who brings nearly 30 years of experience to Apstra at a time when the company is expected to change the competitive landscape as a pioneer in intent-based networking.
Prior to Apstra, Wood was at VeloCloud (acquired by VMware) for three years, where he was VP of worldwide marketing. Prior to VMware and VeloCloud, he was at Akamai, Cisco and Stratacom (acquired by Cisco) in product leadership and engineering roles.
Wood brings with him extensive experience in the areas of product management, product marketing, scaling businesses, driving revenue, incorporating process, and outbound marketing to create lead and demand generation. He has experience scaling organizations within high growth startup environments and extensive hands on experience in networking as a service, virtualization, and the cloud and security sectors.
“We are thrilled to welcome Michael to our growing team,” said Mansour Karam, CEO and Founder – Apstra, Inc. “Michael has a great depth and understanding of what it takes to scale product management, product marketing and deliver results in a fast-paced startup environment which was really important for us to consider in this critical hire. He is a proven marketing executive with the ability to effectively lead our talented global marketing team.”
“It’s an exciting time at Apstra and I am looking forward to helping to leverage our deep expertise in intent-based networking to transform data center operations,” said Michael Wood. “Apstra has an incredible amount of traction and I look forward to working with this passionate team to help enterprise, service provider and cloud customers realize massive TCO savings through data center network automation solutions.”