Doug Merritt will lead cloud networking provider Aviatrix Systems.
(Bloomberg) — Cloud networking provider Aviatrix Systems Inc. has a new chairman and chief executive officer: former Splunk Inc. CEO Doug Merritt.
Aviatrix was valued at $2 billion by investors in 2021. Since then, the market for cloud computing has been upended. Many cloud customers are delaying or cutting back on spending overall, eating into the revenue of companies like Aviatrix. At the same time, businesses continue to shift their applications to the cloud.
“The number of mission-critical applications in cloud is relatively small” and will grow, Merritt said. “The networking, and the networking security element, has got to follow.” Aviatrix’s products help customers’ systems — including routing, firewalls and logins — work smoothly across the various cloud services from Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
Santa Clara-based Aviatrix, founded a decade ago by Sherry Wei, is on track for annual revenue of around $100 million, said outgoing CEO Steve Mullaney. “I’m the one to one-hundred-million guy,” Mullaney said of his pending departure. “I’m not a 100 to a billion guy.” At Splunk, Mullaney said, Merritt took revenue past $1 billion after joining the company in 2014 and eventually becoming CEO. He left in 2021, six months after Silver Lake invested $1 billion into the company. Splunk currently has a $17 billion market cap.
Aviatrix likely won’t need another funding round, Merritt said, and could be ready for an initial public offering in 2025, assuming market conditions improve. He will assume the CEO role effective July 6.
Aviatrix currently employs around 350 people and works with customers like Adobe Inc. and Heineken NV.
Before joining Aviatrix, Mullaney sold Nicira Networks, a company that pioneered the use of cloud-based servers, to VMware Inc. in 2012 for $1.26 billion.
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