about
Security at the
Speed of the Cloud
Our Mission
The requirements of security are changing again.
Decades ago, organizations moved from mainframes to servers. In the process, a model of security emerged that relied on well-architected networks, firewalls, DMZs, and a variety of system-level and application-level security controls. Today, organizations are moving on again. Across every industry, organizations are now taking a “cloud-first” approach to drive greater business agility and competitive business advantage. But as they make the move, the number one challenge is how to achieve these benefits whilst maintaining resilience and security.
Because it is dynamic, invisible, and aligns to cloud agility requirements, only Valtix delivers multi-cloud network security at the speed of the cloud.
5 Facts About Valtix
1
The Valtix journey started in 2002 when Co-founders and CTOs Vishal Jain and Vijay Chander, and Co-founder and Chief Architect, Praveen Patnala first met at Cisco-acquired Andiamo.
2
The founders bring together a trifecta of experience in cloud, networking, and security that was built working at Cisco, Google Cloud, Akamai, and Pensando.
3
CEO Douglas Murray is a serial entrepreneur and was a finalist for E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year in 2017 and successfully led Big Switch Networks through acquisition to Arista Networks.
4
The Valtix leadership team brings experience from network and security leaders including Big Switch Networks, Juniper, Palo Alto Networks, Thousand Eyes, Tanium, and Expanse.
5
Valtix is well funded and backed by investors such as Trinity, Vertex, and Wing as well as blue-chip networking titan Cisco.
Meet the Leadership Team
Douglas Murray
CEO
Douglas Murray
CEO
Doug is CEO of Valtix. Prior to Valtix, he spent nearly seven years as CEO of Big Switch Networks, a pioneer in multi-cloud Software Defined Networking (SDN) and network observability (acquired by Arista Networks). Prior to Big Switch, Doug was at Juniper Networks, where he held the roles of SVP & GM of its $1B business across APJC, and SVP & GM of its Security business unit (formerly NetScreen). While serving on various corporate boards, he helped guide early-stage companies to success including Altor Networks (acquired by Juniper, 2010) and FireEye (IPO, 2013). He was also named Finalist, EY Entrepreneur of the Year Northern California (2017). Doug holds a BA in History from Colgate University, an MBA from Johns Hopkins University, and has completed Executive Education in Leadership at Columbia University.
Vishal Jain
Co-Founder & CTO
Vishal Jain
Co-Founder & CTO
Vishal is the Co-Founder and CTO of Valtix. Vishal was also the founding CEO of Valtix. Vishal is a seasoned executive and has held engineering leadership roles across many successful startups and big companies in the networking and security space. Vishal was an early member of Andiamo Systems, Nuova Systems, and Insieme Networks, which were acquired by Cisco Systems. Vishal was also responsible for leading the security engineering team at Akamai and built their live streaming service in their early days. Prior to starting Valtix, Vishal was co-founder at Pensando Systems where he was leading security and infrastructure teams. Vishal holds an M.S in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.Tech in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
Vijay Chander
Co-Founder & Chief Scientist
Vijay Chander
Co-Founder & Chief Scientist
Vijay is Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Valtix. He has been the architect for various products in the areas of networking and application security for firewalls as distributed appliances and hypervisor-based distributed firewalls. Prior to co-founding Valtix, at Cisco ACI, which is the industry's most widely adopted Software-Defined Networking(SDN) solution, Vijay was the micro-segmentation architect and one of the key architects of Opflex which enabled declarative policies to be realized imperatively at various network enforcement points like physical/virtual switches, routers, and firewalls. He was a founding engineer at various companies, which were all acquired and turned into big revenue-generating product lines for companies like Cisco. He is a named inventor on 16 issued/pending patents. Vijay holds an M.S in Computer Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a B.Tech in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
Praveen Patnala
Co-Founder & Chief Architect
Praveen Patnala
Co-Founder & Chief Architect
Praveen is Co-Founder and Chief Architect at Valtix. Prior to co-founding Valtix, he was an engineer at Google Cloud Platform working on GCP Networking. He previously worked at Andiamo System (acquired by Cisco) before joining as an early employee at BloomReach (late-stage startup) and then LaserLike (acquired by Apple). In the first 10 years of his career, Praveen worked on data center technologies working on firewalls, network proxies, storage networking, encryption of data at rest and in transit. In the past 10 years, Praveen has been exclusively building on top of public clouds to build large-scale applications and data infrastructure. He is an inventor in 10 patents related to networking, security, and data infrastructure. Praveen holds an M.S in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a B.Tech in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
Erik Kristiansen
VP of Marketing
Erik Kristiansen
VP of Marketing
Erik is VP of Marketing at Valtix where he leads global brand, communications, product marketing, and demand generation. Previously, he led product marketing at Tanium. Erik joined Tanium in 2015 to build the product marketing function and to pivot the company’s messaging from a single solution to a platform crossing operations and security teams. While at Tanium the company went from several hundred employees to over 2000. Prior to joining Tanium, Erik held leadership roles at IBM where he was responsible for Mobile-First product management and strategy.
Anthony Narducci
VP of Worldwide Sales
Anthony Narducci
VP of Worldwide Sales
Anthony is VP of Worldwide Sales at Valtix and is responsible for leading the company’s go-to-market teams including Sales, Solutions Engineering, and Channels. Anthony has over 20 years of enterprise experience building highly productive sales teams in early and growth-stage companies including Meraki, ClearSlide, ThousandEyes, Expanse, and Vectra AI. Earlier in his career, he held various sales and sales leadership roles at Aruba Networks, Savvius, and Fujitsu. Anthony holds a BA in English from Clemson University and an MBA from UC Davis.
Joe Palazola
VP of Worldwide Operations
Joe Palazola
VP of Worldwide Operations
Joe is VP of Worldwide Operations at Valtix and is responsible for developing and leading the back office teams in support of the company, including HR, Finance, Legal, IT, Business Applications, and Sales Operations. Previously, he was at Big Switch Networks (acquired by Arista Networks) for almost 7 years in a similar capacity. Before joining Big Switch, he was at Juniper Networks and Extreme Networks, leading Business Operations, Program Management, and Customer Escalation teams. He has always been interested in data and the story it tells, living by the DIKW pyramid, striving to provide the information necessary to make decisions quickly and efficiently.
Jigar Shah
VP of Products
Jigar Shah
VP of Products
Jigar is VP of Products at Valtix where he leads the product strategy and manages partnerships with public cloud service providers. Previously he led the VM-Series next-generation firewall (NGFW) team for public cloud security at Palo Alto Networks. He has worked on security for AWS, Azure, and GCP since 2014. As a software engineer, he worked on 3G mobile networks for Motorola and built some of the first e-commerce websites.
Valtix Awards
Inc. Magazine Best Workplace, 2022
May
Gold Winner Hot Security Company of the Year (Security Cloud/SaaS)
February
Cybersecurity Excellence Awards
February
Selected as 2021 SINET16 Innovator
September
Winner of “Top 10 Baby Black Unicorns”
August
Finalist in Fortress Cyber Security Awards
June
Startup of the Year for Security Cloud / SaaS
June
Top Honors in “Next-Gen in Cloud Security”
May
Compliance Certifications
Backed by Leading Investors
