Silver Peak Strengthens EMEA Team to Accelerate Regional Business Expansion

SANTA CLARA, Calif., November 13, 2018 – Silver Peak®, the global SD-WAN leader, delivering the transformational promise of the cloud with a self-driving wide area networkTM, today strengthened its EMEA go-to-market team with the appointments of four seasoned leaders. The new appointments will further accelerate customer acquisition and partner engagement across the region. Silver Peak currently has more than 1,000 production customer deployments worldwide of its business-first Unity EdgeConnectTM SD-WAN edge platform.

The company announced the following new EMEA appointments:

  • Mike Kontowtt - Director of channel sales
  • James Houselander - Director of field marketing
  • Werner Waldhier - Country manager for the Central and Eastern Region (CER)
  • Pierre Langlois - Regional sales director of Southern EMEA and country manager for France

Kontowtt comes to Silver Peak from MSK Consultancy and brings more than 20 years of IT channel experience for major vendors, including Symantec, and will be responsible for driving EMEA sales and the company’s EMEA channel strategy.

Houselander joins the company from Riverbed with nearly 15 years of experience working in marketing and communication roles across the IT sector, including IBM and EMC, and will be responsible for executing the EMEA marketing strategy.

Waldhier was most recently at IHS Markit and brings more than 27 years of experience in IT with leading positions at PTC, Oracle, EMC and Sun Microsystems. Waldhier is responsible for sales growth in CER, specifically in Germany.

Langlois, who has been with the company since 2011, has been promoted and is now responsible for accelerating sales growth in France and across Southern Europe.

Kontowtt, Houselander, Waldhier and Langlois join Kristian Thyregod, vice president for EMEA, and Allan Paton, regional sales director for the United Kingdom and Ireland (UKI), who both joined the company earlier this year.

“Silver Peak is experiencing unprecedented growth across the EMEA region as enterprises increasingly demand a solution that helps them realize the full transformational promise of the cloud,” said Kristian Thyregod, vice president of the EMEA region for Silver Peak. “As the only company in the industry that can truly help distributed organizations break free from the constraints of router-centric WAN approaches with an SD-WAN edge that unifies SD-WAN, firewall, segmentation, routing, WAN optimisation, and application visibility and control in a single platform, Silver Peak is aggressively investing in global expansion. We are assembling a team of leaders with proven track records in building relationships with customers and partners that will accelerate our expansion across the region.”