Aerohive Networks Appoints New Board Member, CFO, and VP of Legal and General Counsel to Leadership Team

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aerohive Networks™, the leader in controller-less Wi-Fi and cloud-enabled networking, today announced that it continues to expand its leadership team to support the company’s rapid growth in the cloud-enabled enterprise Wi-Fi space. Gordon C. Brooks has joined as chief financial officer and Steve Debenham as the company’s vice president of legal and general counsel. The company also announced that Paul Milbury has joined the company’s board of directors, and is chair of its audit committee. These new executive hires follow the company’s recent appointment of a vice president of channel sales in December 2012 and the October 2012 announcement of a new senior vice president of worldwide sales and vice president of operations.

“They all bring extensive experience and knowledge from their time in the trenches at high-growth technology companies and will provide invaluable guidance as we build upon Aerohive’s market leadership.”

News Facts

Gordon C. Brooks joins as Aerohive’s CFO from his position as CFO at Blue Coat Systems, a public networking/security appliance company acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo in February 2012. Gordon served as senior vice president and chief financial officer of Blue Coat from 2009 to 2012, managing finance and accounting functions, investor relations, order administration, manufacturing operations and facilities.
Prior to Blue Coat, Gordon served as vice president of corporate finance at VMware, following his role as chief financial officer for Spikesource. Previously, Gordon worked in senior finance positions at several high tech companies, including BEA Systems, Inc., Microsoft and WebTV Networks. He began his career as an auditor for Ernst & Young.
Steve Debenham joins the Aerohive team as VP of legal services and general counsel. A seasoned senior legal executive with over 20 years of industry and private practice experience, Steve has served in several senior executive and general counsel positions, focusing on early and mid-stage high-growth companies, including Silicor Materials, Asyst Technologies, HARRIS myCFO Inc. and Lam Research Corporation. Prior to his in-house experience, Steve was a partner in a San Francisco Bay Area law firm, focusing on intellectual property litigation.
Paul Milbury brings over 30 years of experience as a technology industry executive and board member to Aerohive and its board. In his career, Paul has worked with both start-ups and multi-billion dollar global enterprises. Paul left Cisco Systems in 2010 after playing an integral part in the integration of Starent Networks, a provider of mobile networking solutions, into Cisco. In his role as vice president of operations and CFO at Starent, Paul guided the company from its IPO process in 2007 to its acquisition by Cisco Systems in 2009 for $2.9 billion.
Prior to Cisco, Paul served as CFO of Avid Technology, a digital media creation, management and distribution company. He has also served in executive financial roles at Digital Equipment Corporation, Juniornet and iBelong.
These three new additions will help Aerohive continue to scale, grow market share and move into industry leadership. This announcement comes on the heels of Aerohive’s new executive hires in the second half of 2012 including Dean Hickman-Smith as senior vice president of worldwide sales, Raphaël Gernez as vice president of operations and Kurt Mills as vice president of channel sales. Aerohive recently secured $22.5 million in Mezzanine Equity financing and grew its customer base to over 7,500 customers worldwide in 2012.

Comments

“As we continue Aerohive’s accelerated growth in 2013, we’re excited to welcome these seasoned executives to our team,” said David Flynn, chief executive officer, Aerohive Networks. “They all bring extensive experience and knowledge from their time in the trenches at high-growth technology companies and will provide invaluable guidance as we build upon Aerohive’s market leadership.”

About Aerohive Networks

People want to work anywhere; on any device, and IT needs to enable them -- without drowning in complexity or compromising on security, performance, reliability or cost. Aerohive's mission is to Simpli-Fi these enterprise access networks with a cloud-enabled, self-organizing, service-aware, identity-based infrastructure that includes innovative Wi-Fi, VPN, branch routing and switching solutions.

Aerohive was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. The company's investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northern Light Venture Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA) and Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). For more information, please visit www.aerohive.com, call us at 408-510-6100, follow us on Twitter @Aerohive, subscribe to our blog or become a fan on our Facebook page.