Ram Gupta Joins Aryaka's Board of Directors

MILPITAS, CA--(Marketwired - Jul 8, 2015) - Aryaka®, the leading WAN as-a-Service company, announced today that Ram Gupta has joined its board of directors and will serve as Executive Chairman. Mr. Gupta currently serves as a director on the boards of Progress Software (NASDAQ: PRGS), FusionOps, Unmetric, Simplilearn, and Uniken, Inc.

Mr. Gupta is a respected Silicon Valley software executive with more than 25 years of strategy and execution expertise in fast-paced, innovative technology companies. His diverse experience ranges from chip design to application software development. He has led teams that built the first healthcare Internet transaction service (WebMD), the first pure Internet application software (PeopleSoft), and the first application integration in the cloud (Cast Iron Systems).

"Ram Gupta has been a visionary leader in the software industry for more than two decades," said Ashwath Nagaraj, CTO at Aryaka. "His rich domain expertise and deep knowledge of the cloud computing market will be invaluable during this next stage of growth for Aryaka. We are honored to welcome Ram to our board as Executive Chairman and are excited to be able to tap into his knowledge as we expand our presence throughout the U.S. and the world."

Aryaka recently secured $16 million in funding, led by Nexus Venture Partners and joined by existing investors Trinity Ventures, InterWest Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Presidio Ventures. The majority of the funding will be used to scale Aryaka's global sales infrastructure in response to rapidly growing demand for its family of SD-WAN, CDN, and Application Acceleration as-a-Service offerings. These intelligent services bypass the public Internet, enabling customers to achieve faster, more stable, and lower-cost global access to cloud data and services.

"I am pleased to be a part of Aryaka at a time when the company is poised to fundamentally change the enterprise networking market. I look forward to contributing to the future progress of this exceptional company as it scales up, continues to rapidly grow its customer base, and expands globally," Gupta said.

Before becoming a seasoned investor and advisor, Ram served as the President and CEO of Cast Iron Systems. During his tenure, the company became the first and the largest vendor of application integrations in the cloud. Both the revenue and the customer base grew by more than 500%. Cast Iron was then acquired by IBM. Prior to that, Ram was the Executive Vice President at PeopleSoft Inc., where he was responsible for strategy, development, marketing, customer support, alliances, and mergers and acquisitions. He led over 6,000 people in 15 different countries and managed a P&L of $1.6B. Under his guidance, PeopleSoft's market capitalization grew from $3 billion to over $10 billion, and the company was then acquired by Oracle.

Ram also served as the Senior Vice President and General Manager at WebMD Corp. He was part of the executive team that grew WebMD from a $5-million-annual-revenue start-up to a public company with a market cap of over $2B. Ram has also led various teams at Silicon Graphics, IBM, and Tata Consultancy Services. He holds several patents in the U.S. and was presented the Smithsonian Computer World "Search for Heroes" Award for the year 2000. Ram holds an MS degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and graduated with Honors in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from BITS Pilani, India.

About Aryaka
Aryaka, the pioneer of WAN as-a-Service, delivers network optimization and application acceleration for the global enterprise, facilitating better collaboration, communication, and business productivity. Aryaka eliminates the need for costly WAN appliances and long-haul private links. Aryaka's groundbreaking WAN Optimization as-a-Service accelerates any application to any location and provides organizations with an affordable, optimized, and fully meshed network to access on-premises applications, as well as cloud services. Aryaka's Application Delivery as-a-Service enables globally distributed employees, customers, partners, and mobile end users to quickly access centralized enterprise applications and public-facing web resources from anywhere in the world. All services provide end-to-end visibility with 24×7 world-class support. To learn more, visit www.aryaka.com. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.