Talari Networks Names Former Riverbed Channel Chief New Head Of Global Sales

WAN virtualization startup Talari Networks has poached Riverbed Technology channel chief Randy Schirman to head up its worldwide sales organization.

In his new role, Schirman will be responsible for supporting and building new relationships with Talari solutions providers and IT resellers around the globe. He starts at Talari this week and will report into Talari's president and CEO Emerick Woods.

In an interview with CRN, Schirman said he had a "wonderful experience" at Riverbed, but is excited to join Talari and to fuel the channel development and engagement efforts the company has started to put in place.

Related: Riverbed Taps Former Cisco Channel Chief Mountford As New Head Of Sales]

"I think there has been some very good initial work that has been put in play, and I'm really excited to take that momentum and accelerate it further," Schirman said.

At Riverbed, Schirman most recently served as senior vice president of worldwide channels and service delivery initiatives. He had headed up Riverbed's channel strategy since 2010, and had been with the San Francisco-based company since 2008.

Schirman's departure from Riverbed comes just one month after Riverbed tapped former Cisco global channel chief Paul Mountford as its new head of direct and indirect sales. Keith Hoskison, senior vice president of worldwide channels and strategic account programs, also continues to oversee Riverbed's partner strategy.

Founded in 2007, San Jose, Calif.-based Talari Networks has carved out a unique place for itself in the WAN optimization market, where it considers its Adaptive Private Networking technologies to be a complement -- rather than a competitor -- to many existing WAN optimization deployments businesses already have in place.

Talari's Adaptive Private Networking products work similarly to how RAID technology is used in storage, leveraging RAID-like techniques, overlay networking and various algorithms to pull together multiple IP bandwidth sources to WAN connections, including DSL, cable and broadband.

Schirman said Talari's ability to mix and match these different bandwidth sources is something more and more and more solution providers, and end customers, have been expressing an interest in.

"[Customers'] worlds are becoming ever more a hybrid of MPLS, broadband internet, ATM – all these technology sources of which these infrastructures were built upon. As I was working with the partner communities, the partners who had traditionally built solutions predicated upon MPLS infrastructures, they were asking what to do with that end user community as their environments are more complex and a greater mix of these network infrastructures are coming into play," Schirman said. "The long and short of it is that Talari has the ability to address that."

Schirman's departure from Riverbed also comes as the company faces mounting shareholder pressure to pursue a sale. Riverbed in February rejected a $3.36 billion takeover bid from activist shareholder Elliott Management, saying the price was too low.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 22, 2014