Riverbed CEO steps down

Founder and chief exec Jerry Kennelly departs after 16 years

Riverbed CEO and co-founder Jerry Kennelly has announced his departure from the vendor, with channel exec Paul Mountford stepping into his shoes.

The San Francisco-based player has been led by Kennelly since 2002.

Commenting on his departure, Kennelly said: "I'm extremely proud of what our team has built at Riverbed over the last 16 years, growing from a start-up to a billion-dollar company serving 30,000 customers and every Forbes Global 100 company."

Mountford has been at Riverbed for four years where he was an SVP running the vendor's partner programme. It's not the first time he's led from the top, as he was formerly CEO of Sentillian, a New York-based web intelligence start-up. He also ran Cisco's channel partner programme from 2001 to 2006.

"I'm honoured to lead this team as the next CEO," Mountford said.

"We have an extraordinary opportunity in front of us to lead businesses forward as they modernise their IT architecture to take full advantage of cloud and mobile technologies and accelerate their digital strategies.

"Jerry has created a fantastic culture at Riverbed built on collaboration, customer-centricity, innovation, and community, and I look forward to further building on this culture with the thousands of employees and partners we have around the world."

The network vendor claims it has 3,000 partners globally, with nine EMEA distributors.

Earlier in the year, it underwent a global restructuring of its partner programme, dropping sales and technical certification requirements, choosing instead to reward partners who reach performance-based targets.