Trio Of New Sales VPs: Cradlepoint Nabs Industry Talent From Avaya, Aruba, Riverbed

Fast-growing wireless networking company CradlePoint has added a trio of industry veterans to its sales leadership team and named a new CTO.

The Boise, Idaho-based vendor recently reported a 50-plus percent compound annual growth rate and has quadrupled company revenue over the past three years, according to Ed Walton, newly hired vice president of North American channel and alliances. That trend, he said, will continue under his watch.

"There's no reason why we couldn't double [revenue] in the next two or three years," said Walton in an interview with CRN. "I'm looking at where the market is going, where the explosive growth and upside is, and the market is just exploding for LTE and cellular solutions. … A lot of customers are evaluating what they're doing at the edge and more and more are looking at LTE and cellular not just as a failover but for primary edge connectivity."

[Related: New Cisco Channel Chief: Bahr Stepping Into Global Role As Klein Departs]

Walton is in charge of the North American channel sales team and will focus on developing new strategic alliance partnerships. He previously was global strategic accounts and vertical strategy leader at Avaya.

The other new sales leaders at Cradlepoint are Dan DesRosiers, vice president of sales West, and Jeff Manning, vice president of sales East.

DesRosiers spent the previous eight years at Aruba Networks focusing on public sector sales in the Western region with past experience consulting for IBM and ThruPoint, according to his LinkedIn profile. Hewlett-Packard acquired Aruba in May for $3 billion. Manning has held sales executive roles at Morotola and Zscaler, with his last role as global account executive at Riverbed Technology.

Cradlepoint said the new hires demonstrate the "unprecedented" growth it has seen in the past year, including the recent appointment of Ryan Allphin as its new CTO. Allphin previously was senior vice president and general manager of the Security Management Business Unit at Intel.

Cradlepoint touts itself as a global leader in 3G/4G network solutions targeted at the machine-to-machine, transportation and Internet of Things spaces. The company closed a $48 million funding round earlier this year.

Walton said a key focus to winning over market share is Cradlepoint's channel strategy.

"The strategy for the company is to grow through those partners we have today and new partners being developed," said Walton. "It's all about enabling channel partners to make it easier to do business with Cradlepoint -- streamline things like deal registration, discounts, training. … The evolution in Cradlepoint's partner program in getting new enterprise partners as well as growing the current customer base, and also from an MSP standpoint those growth strategies will lead to nothing but explosive success and continue Cradlepoint on its growth trajectory."

PUBLISHED JULY 13, 2015