Q&A with Tim Larder, Director of Sales, UK & Ireland

Q. Prior to joining Aviatrix in April 2023, you spent more than seven years at top cloud service provider (CSP) Amazon Web Services (AWS) in leadership global client director roles. What made you take the leap to a start-up?

A. Shortly after joining Aviatrix, I was introduced during a company all-hands meeting and the then CEO asked why I left the top cloud provider to join a start-up. I jokingly said that I was having a midlife crisis. Truth be told, I had 20 fun and successful years selling and leading teams at large technology companies but longed for the next big challenge and the ability to make a greater impact. I discussed the opportunity at Aviatrix with my family, and the only stipulation was set by my 10-year-old daughter. If I led sales in the United Kingdom and Ireland (UK&I), I had the green light from her to start a new career chapter at Aviatrix. With my experience in cloud and networking, and the massive market opportunity for Aviatrix, the timing was perfect. I’m excited to be working with a team that is focused on and fully committed to customer success. Only being a few months in, I can say that it’s been a great leap!

Q. Over the last several years, Aviatrix has seen an uptick in both sales leadership and cloud engineering applicants looking to join the company. Beyond the current market shifts at CSPs and beyond, what do you think are the top attractors?

A. Many sales leaders and engineers are looking to join smaller dynamic technology companies, attracted by the opportunity to differentiate themselves, and accelerate their career aspirations. Aviatrix ticks all the boxes—a well-funded, born in the cloud start-up that’s in a significant growth phase, creating a new market segment while supporting the top Fortune 500 companies in their quest to move to the cloud.

Q. In your sales leadership role at Aviatrix, you work with various teams to ensure that customers, partners, and prospects have what they need to succeed. What can you share about your experience with the Aviatrix team when it comes to getting customers with complex networking and security needs met and challenges resolved?

A. As a sales leader, it’s rewarding to hear from our customers how our platform is delivering tremendous value. It’s even more gratifying to hear them sing consistent praise for our engineering and support teams as we help them navigate through deployments, migrations, and incident management. The team’s “can do attitude,” paired with their extensive cloud networking and network security skills, ability to problem solve at every twist and turn, and get things done quickly, delivers the best possible outcomes for our enterprise customers.

Q. You switched from an engineering role to a sales role in 2007. What made you switch gears?

A. After rejoining Cisco in 2007, as a Systems Engineer and spending five years in various pre-sales technical roles, I decided to transition to sales. I’ve always enjoyed the technical aspect of my career, but found myself more interested in creating, owning, and delivering a sales strategy and working with customers to execute on their next undertaking. Having a technical and analytical background has given me a huge advantage in my sales leadership roles throughout the years. Wearing these two hats allows me to dive deep with customers, understand the potential blockers, and ultimately sell and deliver successfully.

Q. Aviatrix recently announced its new CEO, former Splunk CEO Doug Merritt. Being in sales, what excites you most about growing the company further with Merritt at the helm?

A. I’m super excited that Doug has chosen to join Aviatrix as our new CEO. During my nearly seven-year tenure at AWS, I had the pleasure of working with Splunk—an Aviatrix customer—as their team focused on long term value, partnerships, and customer success, which is a testament to Doug’s leadership. Doug brings a wealth of leadership experience and knowledge to the table and I’m really looking forward to helping deliver on his vision for the company and the next stage of our accelerated growth to IPO.

Q. Residing in and serving both the United Kingdom and Ireland, are there more specific challenges these countries face that Aviatrix better addresses than other like solutions in the market?

A. Many challenges remain the same globally. When organizations look to accelerate their journey to cloud, a mature cloud networking architecture is required to avoid complexity, cost, and risks. UK&I and European companies have additional challenges in adhering to very strict industry regulatory and country laws, as well as addressing the cloud, networking, and security skills gap. Aviatrix is in a unique position in providing these companies a solution that delivers flexibility in deploying workloads in any or all clouds while enabling interoperability, visibility, controlling costs, and helping address regulatory, data protection, and cloud network security challenges. The company offers a unique cloud networking and network security training program to help reskill and close the gaps with its Aviatrix Certified Engineer (ACE) program. In just a few years, the program has soared to more than 20,000 members, which is quite remarkable and a testament to the company’s commitment to empowering IT professionals even beyond its own solution.

Q. What advice would you give to aspiring sales professionals looking to land a job in sales at Aviatrix?

A. While I worked at Amazon, there were four leadership principles that were front and center—Customer obsession, ownership, earn trust, and deliver results. I still believe in these core values. For any ambitious sales professional here at Aviatrix or elsewhere, embracing these principles will help you and your customers soar. In addition, expect plenty of challenges, change, and having a whole lot of fun along the way.

Prior to joining Aviatrix, Tim spent more than seven years at leading cloud service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) in leadership roles, serving as a Global Client Director in FMCG and a Client Director in Financial Services. He worked at Cisco for 15 years, joining as a Systems Engineer and throughout his tenure, held a series of sales leadership roles, including Global Client Account Manager for internationally recognized financial institutions Lloyds Banking Group and Nomura. He started his career as an IT Engineer at NatWest and received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Systems and Networks (1st) from the University of Plymouth. Tim resides in London. Connect with Tim on LinkedIn. View the Careers page for the latest Aviatrix job openings.