Steve Mullaney brings 30 years of marketing, product management, and engineering experience in network infrastructure and security to Aviatrix. Most recently, Steve was the CEO of Nicira Inc., a network virtualization and software-defined networking company, from 2009 until it was acquired in 2012 by VMware for $1.26 billion. Nicira invented the concept of offering software-based services running on top of networking hardware. Mullaney became the senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s Networking and Security business unit following Nicira’s acquisition.

Prior to Nicira, he served as vice president, marketing, and interim CEO for Palo Alto Networks. During his tenure, Mullaney oversaw the company’s invention of the next-generation firewall market category, which helped cement Palo Alto Networks’ reputation as a thought leader and cybersecurity innovator.

Steve also held executive positions at Blue Coat, Force10, Cisco, Growth Networks, ShoreTel, Bay Networks and SynOptics, and began his career as a design engineer at GTE Government Systems. Steve holds a BSEE from the University of Rhode Island.

Sherry Wei was inspired to start Aviatrix in 2013 after a long career at Cisco and Huawei.. The idea behind the technology was to extend the enterprise datacenter to AWS without touching the underlying network infrastructure. Aviatrix was able to acquire a couple of enterprise customers using its hybrid cloud solution before receiving funding.

Prior to Huawei, Sherry worked at Cisco for 13 years. She led and developed multiple Cisco first generation products, among them the first Intel-based Cisco Integrated System Router (ISR) and the first Cisco T1/E1 Voice and WAN Interface Module.Sherry joined Cisco as part of the acquisition of Ardent Communications where she was the first employee and wrote a significant amount of code. Prior to Ardent, Sherry was an early employee at Centillion Networks that was acquired by Bay Networks (Nortel). Sherry holds a Ph.D from Purdue University in EECS.

John Jendricks serves as the Chief Operating Officer for Aviatrix. Formerly Chief of staff for VMware CEO, Pat Gelsinger, Jendricks initially joined VMware six years ago as vice president, business development and operations, alongside the Nicira acquisition. He has over 35 years of technology experience in driving innovative technologies to become industry-leading products.

Prior to joining VMware, Jendricks was responsible for business & commercial operations as Vice President, business development and operations at Nicira, Inc. Jendricks also spent many years as CIO in the industry, leading technology implementation at Adobe, Wellfleet (acquired by Synoptics), Juniper Networks and StrataCom (acquired by Cisco).

James Winebrenner serves as Senior Vice President of worldwide sales at Aviatrix. Responsible for driving global sales growth and go-to-market strategy, James most recently served nearly six years as Vice President of worldwide sales at Viptela, the cloud-first, software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) solution acquired by Cisco for $610 million in 2017. Prior to that, he was a director in the Global Enterprise division for Cisco for eight years, leading top-tier financial accounts.

Prior to Cisco, James managed the major accounts team at Siegeworks, serving Fortune 200 customers where he led the transition of sales and business-development teams in the company’s merger with Fishnet Security. He also served as Vice President of consulting services at Network Presence, and held numerous sales, business development and technical marketing roles while at Check Point Software Technologies.

Frank Cabri is Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Aviatrix, bringing over 25 years of experience in data security and cloud infrastructure to the role.  Prior to Aviatrix, Frank served as Vice President of Marketing at Imperva (NYSE: IMPV) as part of the Cloud Security business unit following Imperva’s acquisition of Skyfence. Before Imperva, he was part of the executive management team at Centrify as VP Worldwide Marketing, where he led the planning and execution of the company’s brand, demand generation, product marketing and go-to-market strategies for identity management across data center, cloud and mobile. Centrify was later acquired by Thoma Bravo in 2017.

Cabri has also held senior marketing and product management roles at Blue Coat (acquired by Symantec) and MCI (now Verizon) Communications.

Rod Stuhlmuller is an experienced, early stage technology market creation executive, Rod brings over 25 years of product marketing experience and base of knowledge in cloud, data center and mobile networking, network management, network security and AI. A serial “startup guy”, Rod was Sr. Director of Product Marketing for VMware’s Network and Security Business Unit after leading product marketing for Nicira, the early stage startup that created the network virtualization market and was acquired by VMware in 2012.

Prior to Nicira, Rod has held management positions at several startup companies including ActivCard (ActivIdentity) after beginning his career in field systems engineer and product management roles with industry leaders Bay Networks, Synoptics and Novell.

Deepesh is an experienced leader with over 20 years of experience in service provider and enterprise networking with extensive experience in the areas of Cloud Services, datacenter networking and operations and mobile networking. Deepesh has built out several customer facing teams focused on network design and architecture, day 2 operations, support and DevOps within high growth startup environments.

Prior to Aviatrix, Deepesh served as the Director of Customer engineering at Uhana (acquired by VMware in 2019) where he managed an SRE team to design and deploy Uhana’s next generation wireless networks platform, harnessing the power of SDN, machine learning and predictive analytics to manage and optimize mobile networks for large Service Providers in the US, Europe and ANZ regions. Before Uhana, Deepesh was part of the Solutions Architect team at Nicira Inc. until its acquisition by VMware in 2012 and continued to lead a team of Solutions Architects in VMware’s Networking and Security Business Unit before joining Uhana. Prior to Nicira, Deepesh served as a technical lead in customer focused teams at Juniper and Tellabs.

Nauman Mustafa is an experienced, “Technology Change Agent” who is passionate about adoption and expansion of cutting edge and disruptive technologies into modern businesses. With deep roots in Networking and Security, Nauman brings over 19 years of industry experience across Cisco, Nicira/VMware and Alcatel. He is well known to build top talent Solutions Architecture teams and mastermind execution of key initiatives that challenges the status quo and brings a fresh mindset. With strong focus on Human empowerment, Nauman has led several strategic initiatives around customer product expansion, modernization of solution architectures, partner mentoring, field enablement and new idea incubation.

Prior to joining Aviatrix, Nauman was a Director & Global Technology Adoption leader at VMware. In this role, he was instrumental in driving their Networking, Security and Cloud Native Portfolio from ground up to multi-billion dollar ‘likeable’ products. Before VMware, Nauman held several management and technical leadership roles at Cisco with focus on success of various voice/video, data center and cloud solutions.

Nauman holds a M.S Degree in EECS from SIUE as well as industry certifications CCIE, VCDX-NV and most recently ACE in Multi-Cloud domain.

Praveen joined Aviatrix in 2014 as the fourth employee. He made significant contributions to the product evolution, especially in the area of software architecture, performance and scalability. He designed and wrote a large chunk of core infra-structure code running on Aviatrix controller and gateways. He is passionate about the craft of programming and enjoys solving complex problems through research and analysis.

Prior to joining Aviatrix, Praveen worked at Cisco for 7 years where he was involved in the development of ISR routers and was the lead engineer for a router platform which combined multi-core usage and virtualization. Praveen holds an MS in in Electrical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University.

Cheng left Huawei to join Aviatrix as the first engineer in 2014. He was instrumental in delivering Aviatrix products to extend the enterprise datacenter to AWS, Azure, and Google clouds using a cloud-native approach. He quickly worked his way up to become the Director of Software Development in 2016. Cheng now serves as Vice President of Software Development managing the Aviatrix software development team. Cheng’s experience includes over 20 years in real-time embedded systems software development with several leading networking companies.

Prior to Huawei, Cheng worked at Cisco for 13 years. He participated and developed a number of Cisco first generation products, including the first Intel-based Cisco Integrated System Router (ISR), the first Broadcom based Integrated System Router and the first Cisco T1/E1 Voice and WAN Interface Module on 7200/7500 platforms. Prior to Cisco, Cheng was as a software manager at Nortel developing PBX products.

In his spare time, Cheng spends time with his family, enjoys movies, and plays music.

Chee Kiong Soon serves as Vice President of Customer Success at Aviatrix. CK worked at Cisco for over 16 years and was instrumental in the development testing of various Cisco enterprise routing products such as Cisco ASK1K, ISR series, DSL, wireless and 4G routers. As a technical leader, CK successfully led the system and solution testing of Cisco’s first Enterprise Network Function Virtualization (NFV) ENCS 5000 and NFV Infrastructure Software (NFVIS) on Cisco UCS platforms. He also served as a trainer to Cisco customers on NFVIS and Enterprise Service Automation (ESA).

Prior to Cisco, CK was the APAC Technical Support Engineer at CS Telecom based in Singapore.

Liming Xiang serves as Vice President of Software Quality Assurance and is in charge of feature, system, solution, automation and CI/CD tests. He left Cisco in 2015 and took the challenge to join Aviatrix as the first QA engineer. Liming jumpstarted Aviatrix’s testing engine and built the development testing infrastructure and engineer team from scratch. He is also the key contributor in the designing, prototyping and testing (both manual and automation) of many Aviatrix solutions and features.

Prior to Aviatrix, Liming was a senior technical leader at Cisco access router BU. Throughout his 15 years at Cisco, he had been a well recognized top performer/leader of many Cisco projects including IOS features (routing, switching, security, VoIP, QoS, Multicast and etc), hardware modules (HW crypto engine, VIC, WIC, VWIC, HWIC and EHWIC) and platforms (ISR, ISR-G2 and ISR-NG).

Liming holds two Master’s degrees in both Computer Science and Economics.