Silver Peak, the global leader in broadband and hybrid WAN solutions, announced today that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has named David Hughes, Founder & CEO of Silver Peak, to its 2016 list of Top 100 Executives. This annual list recognizes leaders from the technology industry who have played an integral role in shaping today’s IT channel, whether by driving huge cultural shifts, creating rich new opportunities or forging innovative new routes to success.

With a passion and drive to build a better WAN, David Hughes early on identified an opportunity to close the application performance gap across the Wide Area Network (WAN). In 2004, David sought to address this gap by launching Silver Peak, where he both uniquely designed and engineered the company’s initial flagship WAN optimization solutions. Since then, David has taken the company from start-up to industry leader by successfully pre-empting innovation advancements in networking. Through his innate instincts and predictive vision David foresaw the need for a software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) as enterprises commenced migrating applications from the data center to the cloud. He also accurately predicted that the reliance on MPLS exclusively would not address the performance requirements of connecting users to applications across today’s globally distributed enterprises. Unlike other CEO’s, David built Silver Peak’s technology portfolio from start to finish, giving the company the most complete SD-WAN solutions available today and successfully leading the company into a new, high growth, market category.  

Today, global enterprises across 77 countries rely on Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN solutions to provide secure and reliable virtual overlays to connect users to applications with the flexibility to use any combination of underlying transport technologies without compromising application performance. Enterprises realize dramatic cost reductions, greater business agility and faster time to value for strategic business initiatives.

“The executives on our 2016 Top 100 list have led their companies to extraordinary achievements, both technological and entrepreneurial,” said Robert Faletra, CEO of The Channel Company. “We congratulate each of this year’s Top 100 Executives and celebrate their trailblazing contributions to the advancement of the IT channel.”

“David’s ability to design, build and drive a technology vision into a new market is unparalleled across the networking industry,” said John Vincenzo, SVP & CMO of Silver Peak. “Over a decade ago, David saw the opportunity to launch Silver Peak into the hot WAN optimization market and has since evolved the company’s vision well ahead of the market to drive a new wave of innovation with the most complete SD-WAN solution portfolio available today. The success of the company is rooted in David’s strategic technical vision and ability to operationally execute in a highly competitive global marketplace.”

The Top 100 Executives list will be featured in the August 2016 issue of CRN.