Global sales leader out of Red Hat, NGINX and SUSE/Rancher joins the company that created the popular open source projects eBPF and Cilium, redefining enterprise networking, security, and observability.
Isovalent, the leading company behind the rapidly growing open source technologies Cilium and eBPF, announced that Ian Knight has joined the company as Chief Revenue Officer. In his new role, Knight will manage Isovalent’s global go-to-market strategy as enterprises around the world adopt Cilium and eBPF to achieve a single connectivity layer that unifies cloud-native and legacy infrastructure.
Cilium is an open source software for networking, security and observability between container workloads on Kubernetes infrastructure. Fueled by the revolutionary kernel technology eBPF, Cilium has become the de facto technology for Kubernetes platform engineering teams at major enterprises across every industry–and the default networking and network security layer for the most popular public cloud providers’ Kubernetes services, including Microsoft (AKS), Google (GKE, Anthos) and Amazon (EKS-A).
eBPF and Cilium are two of the fastest-growing cloud-native infrastructure technologies in the Kubernetes ecosystem, with major enterprise users like Visa, eBay, Adobe, CapitalOne, Bell, Palantir, Ikea, and Sky. eBPF’s co-creator, Daniel Borkmann, is Principal Software Engineer at Isovalent. Cilium’s creator, Thomas Graf, is Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder at Isovalent.
“Isovalent is the most exciting company in cloud-native infrastructure, because its founders are the creators of and top contributors to its most innovative open source projects, and that vantage point has given them the deepest understanding of where enterprises are today versus where they are trying to go with Kubernetes,” said Knight. “Enterprises have been stuck in ‘Day 2’ Kubernetes for a long time, and these are the technologies that are propelling the industry forward in the most interesting observability and security use cases.”
Knight’s prior experience includes a decade-long tenure at Red Hat where he helped grow its subscription revenue from $84M to over $1.3B while serving in a variety of leadership positions, including Vice President, Western US Sales. Cilium creator and Isovalent Co-founder and CTO Thomas Graf shared 9 years with Knight at Red Hat, where Graf was the technical lead for the kernel networking team. Knight was also part of the executive team that built the commercial go to market at NGINX and later sold to F5, ultimately serving as VP, Global NGINX Sales.
Knight’s addition to the leadership team comes just months after the company appointed Sejal Korenromp as VP of Marketing. Korenromp joined most recently from Snyk, and prior to that spent over seven years in Marketing leadership roles at Elastic, the company behind the three very popular open source projects — Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana.
Martin Casado, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, shares “Building something like Cilium, and an enterprise offering around it, is no small feat. We believe that the team at Isovalent is hands down the most equipped for the job. They have decades of experience in Cilium, eBPF and the foundational technologies that led up to it.”
“At Isovalent, we are here to build amazing technology, foster thriving open source communities around eBPF and Cilium, and help enterprises, telcos, governments, and other organizations overcome critical challenges as they run their mission-critical applications on Kubernetes,” said Isovalent CEO and co-founder Dan Wendlandt. “Ian Knight is another talented addition to the Isovalent executive team, bringing deep experience in commercial open source solutions and how to make the world’s leading organizations successful with major infrastructure modernization initiatives.”
Isovalent has also enjoyed significant industry recognition, including the 2023 GigaOm Radar for Cloud Networking. In the report, Isovalent falls in the Innovation/Feature Play quadrant as an “outperformer and leader,” having expanded its initial container networking scope to multi- and hybrid- cloud use cases.
Isovalent was founded by Dan Wendlandt and Thomas Graf in 2017 after creating the Cilium open source project based on the powerful eBPF technology. The company provides an enterprise-grade distribution of Cilium to solve the cloud native challenges of enterprises in the era of Kubernetes. Today, the company has seen 3x ARR growth year-over-year for the second time in a row and closed multiple new >$1M ARR deals in the last two quarters. Enterprise customers are using Isovalent Enterprise for Cilium as their preferred solution for networking, security, observability in Kubernetes and cloud native environments.
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