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SolarWinds Names New President and CEO

SolarWinds Corporation and its Board of Directors have named Sudhakar Ramakrishna as the company’s new President and CEO and a member of the Board of Directors, each to become effective on January 4, 2021.

“Following an extensive and thorough search, we are delighted to welcome Sudhakar Ramakrishna as SolarWinds’ new CEO as we embark on an exciting new chapter in the company’s history,” said Bill Bock, Chairman of the Board of SolarWinds. “Sudhakar is a proven leader and has significant experience leading and scaling world-class, global technology organizations. His deep expertise in strategic planning and execution, organizational development and product strategy will be especially beneficial and, when teamed with the seasoned SolarWinds leadership team, will provide strong and experienced executive leadership for the future of SolarWinds”.

Bock continued, “We would also like to thank Kevin Thompson for his many years of service to SolarWinds. Under his guidance, SolarWinds has grown into a leader in IT infrastructure management with a portfolio of products designed to meet the real world needs of IT professionals who manage today’s complex IT environments. He has been instrumental in helping build a company with a differentiated financial profile, strong discipline and a close connection with the IT Pro, DevOps and MSP communities. SolarWinds is well positioned, thanks to his long-time leadership and dedication.”

“SolarWinds is at the forefront of enabling customers to manage complex IT environments with simple and integrated solutions. I am honored to have the opportunity to work with the excellent team at SolarWinds to accelerate our focus on customer success, as we deliver solutions to serve the emerging needs of IT, Application and Security professionals even as they adapt to an increasingly hybrid world,” said Sudhakar Ramakrishna.

Sudhakar Ramakrishna is an experienced, global technology leader with nearly 25 years of experience across cloud, mobility, networking, security and collaboration markets. He most recently served as the CEO of Pulse Secure®, a privately-held provider of secure and zero trust access solutions for Hybrid IT environments, where he was responsible for all aspects of business strategy and execution.

Prior to Pulse Secure, Ramakrishna served as the Senior VP and GM for the Enterprise and Service Provider Division at Citrix®, where he had responsibility for Citrix’s portfolio of virtualization, cloud networking, mobile platforms and cloud services solutions. Ramakrishna also has held senior leadership roles at Polycom, Motorola, Stoke, 3Com and U.S. Robotics. He earned a master’s degree in computer science from Kansas State University and a master’s of management degree from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

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SolarWinds Names New President and CEO

SolarWinds Corporation and its Board of Directors have named Sudhakar Ramakrishna as the company’s new President and CEO and a member of the Board of Directors, each to become effective on January 4, 2021.

“Following an extensive and thorough search, we are delighted to welcome Sudhakar Ramakrishna as SolarWinds’ new CEO as we embark on an exciting new chapter in the company’s history,” said Bill Bock, Chairman of the Board of SolarWinds. “Sudhakar is a proven leader and has significant experience leading and scaling world-class, global technology organizations. His deep expertise in strategic planning and execution, organizational development and product strategy will be especially beneficial and, when teamed with the seasoned SolarWinds leadership team, will provide strong and experienced executive leadership for the future of SolarWinds”.

Bock continued, “We would also like to thank Kevin Thompson for his many years of service to SolarWinds. Under his guidance, SolarWinds has grown into a leader in IT infrastructure management with a portfolio of products designed to meet the real world needs of IT professionals who manage today’s complex IT environments. He has been instrumental in helping build a company with a differentiated financial profile, strong discipline and a close connection with the IT Pro, DevOps and MSP communities. SolarWinds is well positioned, thanks to his long-time leadership and dedication.”

“SolarWinds is at the forefront of enabling customers to manage complex IT environments with simple and integrated solutions. I am honored to have the opportunity to work with the excellent team at SolarWinds to accelerate our focus on customer success, as we deliver solutions to serve the emerging needs of IT, Application and Security professionals even as they adapt to an increasingly hybrid world,” said Sudhakar Ramakrishna.

Sudhakar Ramakrishna is an experienced, global technology leader with nearly 25 years of experience across cloud, mobility, networking, security and collaboration markets. He most recently served as the CEO of Pulse Secure®, a privately-held provider of secure and zero trust access solutions for Hybrid IT environments, where he was responsible for all aspects of business strategy and execution.

Prior to Pulse Secure, Ramakrishna served as the Senior VP and GM for the Enterprise and Service Provider Division at Citrix®, where he had responsibility for Citrix’s portfolio of virtualization, cloud networking, mobile platforms and cloud services solutions. Ramakrishna also has held senior leadership roles at Polycom, Motorola, Stoke, 3Com and U.S. Robotics. He earned a master’s degree in computer science from Kansas State University and a master’s of management degree from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

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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 ...