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Riverbed CEO Recognized on CRN List of Top 100 Executives

CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Paul Mountford, Riverbed’s Chief Executive Officer, to its 2018 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 routes to success.

Mountford was appointed CEO of Riverbed in April 2018. He joined Riverbed in 2014 as SVP and Chief Sales Officer, leading the transformation of the global sales organization and partner program as Riverbed evolved into a multi-product platform company that delivers a modern IT architecture for today's digital enterprise. Mountford has played a key role in the execution of Riverbed’s multi-year digital performance strategy, which has included several strategic acquisitions, organic development of digital performance and cloud-based features and functionality, and integration across multiple solutions.

“Visionary and strategic leadership can make the difference between just surviving and actually excelling in this period of disruptive change for the IT channel,” said Bob Skelley, CEO, The Channel Company. “In order for technology suppliers and solution providers to thrive and stay ahead of the competition, they need leaders who are able to envision both the future of the channel and the role their organization needs to play in order to create that reality. CRN’s 2018 Top 100 Executives embody these qualities. They are change agents who deliver unwavering guidance to their companies, always asking where are we headed and not being afraid to take the necessary steps to get there.”

“I am greatly honored to be considered an innovator in this distinguished list alongside my peers,” said Mountford. “The current shift to digital is revolutionary and we’re just at the beginning. Riverbed and our partners have a significant opportunity to help our customers turn digital strategies into digital performance, enabling them to rethink what’s possible. We’ve focused our innovation the last several years on developing the tools for organizations to fully manage and measure the digital experience, and the next-gen infrastructure to put those insights to work, delivering the agility and performance today’s modern enterprise requires.”

Prior to Riverbed, Mountford was CEO of Sentillian, a New York-based web intelligence startup focused on monitoring publicly shared content. Mountford also spent 16 years at Cisco in senior leadership roles, including running Cisco’s $34 billion Enterprise line of business, initiating and leading the company’s Emerging Markets division, and rebuilding and running Cisco’s market leading channel partner program from 2001 to 2006.

The Top 100 Executives list will be featured in the August 2018 issue of CRN.

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Riverbed CEO Recognized on CRN List of Top 100 Executives

CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Paul Mountford, Riverbed’s Chief Executive Officer, to its 2018 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 routes to success.

Mountford was appointed CEO of Riverbed in April 2018. He joined Riverbed in 2014 as SVP and Chief Sales Officer, leading the transformation of the global sales organization and partner program as Riverbed evolved into a multi-product platform company that delivers a modern IT architecture for today's digital enterprise. Mountford has played a key role in the execution of Riverbed’s multi-year digital performance strategy, which has included several strategic acquisitions, organic development of digital performance and cloud-based features and functionality, and integration across multiple solutions.

“Visionary and strategic leadership can make the difference between just surviving and actually excelling in this period of disruptive change for the IT channel,” said Bob Skelley, CEO, The Channel Company. “In order for technology suppliers and solution providers to thrive and stay ahead of the competition, they need leaders who are able to envision both the future of the channel and the role their organization needs to play in order to create that reality. CRN’s 2018 Top 100 Executives embody these qualities. They are change agents who deliver unwavering guidance to their companies, always asking where are we headed and not being afraid to take the necessary steps to get there.”

“I am greatly honored to be considered an innovator in this distinguished list alongside my peers,” said Mountford. “The current shift to digital is revolutionary and we’re just at the beginning. Riverbed and our partners have a significant opportunity to help our customers turn digital strategies into digital performance, enabling them to rethink what’s possible. We’ve focused our innovation the last several years on developing the tools for organizations to fully manage and measure the digital experience, and the next-gen infrastructure to put those insights to work, delivering the agility and performance today’s modern enterprise requires.”

Prior to Riverbed, Mountford was CEO of Sentillian, a New York-based web intelligence startup focused on monitoring publicly shared content. Mountford also spent 16 years at Cisco in senior leadership roles, including running Cisco’s $34 billion Enterprise line of business, initiating and leading the company’s Emerging Markets division, and rebuilding and running Cisco’s market leading channel partner program from 2001 to 2006.

The Top 100 Executives list will be featured in the August 2018 issue of CRN.

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In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...