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LiveAction Names New CEO

LiveAction announced that the company’s Board of Directors has appointed Francine Geist as Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

A B2B software industry veteran, Geist has served as LiveAction’s Chief Financial Officer since joining the company in 2019 and has since taken on successive responsibilities as the Chief Operating Officer and more recently as President.

Steve Stuut has retired from his role as CEO and been named Executive Chairman and a member of the LiveAction Board.

“Over the last several years, LiveAction has seen record growth, heavily invested in product innovation, and continued to build a world class team designed to help customers and partners overcome the most advanced networking and security challenges,” said Steve Stuut, Executive Chairman at LiveAction. “It’s been an honor to serve as the CEO at LiveAction and work with a talented leader like Francine, whose leadership ability was very visible from when she first joined my team. She’s been heavily involved in guiding the strategic direction of LiveAction, resulting in the company delivering record growth in 2021. Francine led several key initiatives, including a shift to a subscription-based software model and a focus on customer success, which led to a greater than 350% increase in net new ARR. Her keen understanding of the networking and security space, combined with her leadership skills and expertise in leading performance driven GTM teams, will ensure the company continues this momentum in the future.”

Geist has more than 25 years of senior management experience, leading financial strategy, operations, and GTM for B2B software and data companies. Prior to LiveAction, she served as the Deputy CFO and VP of Finance at INTTRA, a software and network business for the shipping industry where she led the company through a successful exit and sale to E2Open. She also previously served as the VP of Global Sales Operations and Finance at TravelClick, a private-equity sponsored global provider of cloud-based data solutions for maximizing hotel revenue, and spent 10 years with Dun & Bradstreet, a leading provider of B2B commercial information and insights. Geist began her career with Deloitte & Touche and has an M.B.A. in finance from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

“The world has experienced unprecedented challenges over the last two years and Steve’s leadership as CEO has been crucial to LiveAction’s continued success. His knowledge will continue to be invaluable as the Executive Chairman and member of the board,” said Mike Triplett, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “On the flip side, we’re extremely excited that Francine will be stepping into the CEO leadership role and we’re confident in her ability to lead this next phase of growth for LiveAction and its customers. She’s a proven leader that has demonstrated throughout her career that she drives results and builds strong teams.”

“Leading enterprises around the world rely on LiveAction’s network performance monitoring and security solutions to gain visibility into their networks and to remediate problems quickly. With the launch of ThreatEye NV earlier this year, we’re working to give our customers a unified platform for security incident detection and response” said Francine Geist, CEO at LiveAction. “Steve has done a fantastic job laying the foundation for future growth and I am committed to investing in product innovation, and operational excellence to drive business growth and better support our customers and partners. “

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LiveAction Names New CEO

LiveAction announced that the company’s Board of Directors has appointed Francine Geist as Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

A B2B software industry veteran, Geist has served as LiveAction’s Chief Financial Officer since joining the company in 2019 and has since taken on successive responsibilities as the Chief Operating Officer and more recently as President.

Steve Stuut has retired from his role as CEO and been named Executive Chairman and a member of the LiveAction Board.

“Over the last several years, LiveAction has seen record growth, heavily invested in product innovation, and continued to build a world class team designed to help customers and partners overcome the most advanced networking and security challenges,” said Steve Stuut, Executive Chairman at LiveAction. “It’s been an honor to serve as the CEO at LiveAction and work with a talented leader like Francine, whose leadership ability was very visible from when she first joined my team. She’s been heavily involved in guiding the strategic direction of LiveAction, resulting in the company delivering record growth in 2021. Francine led several key initiatives, including a shift to a subscription-based software model and a focus on customer success, which led to a greater than 350% increase in net new ARR. Her keen understanding of the networking and security space, combined with her leadership skills and expertise in leading performance driven GTM teams, will ensure the company continues this momentum in the future.”

Geist has more than 25 years of senior management experience, leading financial strategy, operations, and GTM for B2B software and data companies. Prior to LiveAction, she served as the Deputy CFO and VP of Finance at INTTRA, a software and network business for the shipping industry where she led the company through a successful exit and sale to E2Open. She also previously served as the VP of Global Sales Operations and Finance at TravelClick, a private-equity sponsored global provider of cloud-based data solutions for maximizing hotel revenue, and spent 10 years with Dun & Bradstreet, a leading provider of B2B commercial information and insights. Geist began her career with Deloitte & Touche and has an M.B.A. in finance from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

“The world has experienced unprecedented challenges over the last two years and Steve’s leadership as CEO has been crucial to LiveAction’s continued success. His knowledge will continue to be invaluable as the Executive Chairman and member of the board,” said Mike Triplett, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “On the flip side, we’re extremely excited that Francine will be stepping into the CEO leadership role and we’re confident in her ability to lead this next phase of growth for LiveAction and its customers. She’s a proven leader that has demonstrated throughout her career that she drives results and builds strong teams.”

“Leading enterprises around the world rely on LiveAction’s network performance monitoring and security solutions to gain visibility into their networks and to remediate problems quickly. With the launch of ThreatEye NV earlier this year, we’re working to give our customers a unified platform for security incident detection and response” said Francine Geist, CEO at LiveAction. “Steve has done a fantastic job laying the foundation for future growth and I am committed to investing in product innovation, and operational excellence to drive business growth and better support our customers and partners. “

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Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...