Aryaka, announced the appointment of several new executive hires to†the company’s leadership team, including Karen Freitag (Chief Revenue Officer), Michelle Owczarzak (Chief Transformation Officer), and Shashi Kiran (Chief Marketing Officer).
“Connectivity is the lifeblood of the global enterprise and Aryaka is the industry benchmark for secure managed connectivity worldwide. We are excited to have experienced industry veterans join our robust executive leadership team and continue to help build upon the immense success and growth that Aryaka has seen in recent years,” said Matt Carter, CEO of Aryaka. “As our customers expand globally, embrace SD-WAN, or move to the cloud, we’re becoming the de facto choice for their needs to make this happen better, faster, cheaper than anyone else in the industry. Today’s appointments are in line with us building a world class team. Each of these leaders brings tremendous domain knowledge and proven expertise to scale Aryaka’s growth to the next level.”
Karen Freitag, appointed as Chief Revenue Officer, will oversee Aryaka’s global sales organization and be responsible for all revenue-generating functions, including direct and indirect sales channels, account management teams, sales engineering, and sales operations. Freitag has an extensive track record driving growth in highly complex global sales organizations through developing innovative go-to-market strategies, creating operational efficiencies and building high-performance teams for companies such as IBM, Siemens, Ericsson, and Sprint. Most recently, she was Executive Vice President Worldwide Sales for Rivada Networks. Prior to Rivada, Freitag was President of Sprint’s Global Enterprise Business Unit where she led the company’s foray into the Internet of Things, Wholesale, and SD-WAN.
Michelle Owczarzak will be the Chief Transformation Officer for Aryaka. Previously a Senior Vice President at Inteliquent, Owczarzak brings significant experience in recruiting, building, and cultivating top performing organizations. In her current role, she will be focused on evolving Aryaka into a premier growth company, and ensure ongoing initiatives are tracked, executed, and provide business value to their customers around the globe.
Shashi Kiran joins Aryaka as the newest leader in the position of Chief Marketing Officer, overseeing all aspects of marketing, product management, and technology partnerships. Shashi brings 20+ years of diverse experience working at large companies as well as startups. Previously, at Cisco, he held worldwide marketing responsibility of multi-billion dollar portfolios including datacenter, cloud, enterprise networking, and security over a decade long career. Most recently he served as CMO for Quali, a venture-funded startup, as well as Appcito (acquired by A10 networks). Shashi is also on the advisory boards of early-stage venture firms and startups in the Silicon Valley.
These new hires come after the recent appointment of†Matt Carter†as CEO last September, and†Deepak Kumar†as Senior Vice President, Customer Success last December.
Aryaka has seen significant growth over the last year. Hundreds of global enterprise customers, such as Samsung, Cigna, Standard Life, and Air China have chosen Aryaka to streamline their network infrastructure and accelerate mission-critical applications worldwide. Most recently, Aryaka was named “Company of the Year” as part of Light Reading’s 2018 Leading Lights Awards and was selected as the “2018 Product of the Year” by Cloud Computing Magazine.
