Riverbed appoints Dan Smoot as President and CEO

Riverbed today announced the appointment of Dan Smoot to President and CEO to drive the Company’s next phase of growth, and continue its momentum in delivering industry-leading visibility and performance solutions for networks and applications, anywhere users reside. Smoot, who has more than 30 years of experience holding top leadership roles including at Salesforce, Cisco and VMware, joined Riverbed in June 2018. At Riverbed, he has held several executive leadership roles, including most recently COO and leading the company’s Worldwide Sales, Channels and Alliances, Sales Operations and Customer Experience teams.

“Dan has been a stand-out leader at Riverbed and brings tremendous industry experience having held senior leadership roles at some of world’s leading technology companies,” said Robert ‘Tre’ Sayle, Riverbed Board Member and Thoma Bravo Partner (Riverbed is a portfolio company of Thoma Bravo). “Dan has an unwavering commitment to Riverbed’s customers and partners, an exceptional track record driving operational excellence and business results, and is a strong leader of people and culture. Dan is the right leader to take Riverbed to the next level and drive profitable growth for our business, and continued innovation to support customers and partners. I also want to thank our previous CEO, Rich McBee, who helped lead Riverbed during a critical time, including setting a strong foundation for the future and navigating the Company through a global pandemic.”

“I’m greatly honored and excited to be Riverbed’s new CEO, and serve thousands of amazing customers worldwide,” said Dan Smoot, President and CEO. “Riverbed is focused on fueling our next phase of growth by delivering innovative and relevant technologies that help propel our customers’ businesses and enable them to fully capitalize on their digital and IT investments. With leading end-to-end visibility and performance solutions, Riverbed is in a unique position to help business and government organizations as they modernize and secure their networks, accelerate cloud and SaaS migrations, and advance hybrid work environments as employees increasingly work-from-anywhere.”

Smoot was previously Executive Vice President of Global Partner Sales at Salesforce, managing the Worldwide Partner Sales organization. He was also Executive Vice President of Market Readiness at Salesforce, where he created a global organization to deliver critical go-to-market operations. Prior to Salesforce, Smoot worked at VMware as Senior Vice President of Global Customer Operations, overseeing advanced technology sales, global services, renewals, global channels and alliances, OEM/ISV sales and go-to-mark strategy. Before VMware, he spent more than 12 years in a variety of senior leadership roles at Cisco.