Wedge Networks today announced the appointment of James Hamilton as chief executive officer to spearhead the company’s global charge in the rapidly growing cloud security market.
Hamilton, a Wedge Networks board member since 2013, brings extensive executive leadership experience to the rapidly growing company and is widely recognized as one of the cybersecurity industry’s most respected and influential leaders. Most significantly as chief executive officer of TippingPoint, the company that defined Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) and that was acquired for $430 million by 3Com, where he stayed on and continued to lead the TippingPoint line of business.
Throughout James’ career spanning 25 years in network and security industries he has played a major part in defining next generation technologies, successfully taking three companies public, all of which were subsequently acquired. He was also an executive of three other private companies that were acquired, for a total acquisition value exceeding $3.8 billion. Other highly notable achievements include his role as president of Efficient Networks Inc. which became the global leader in DSL technology and was acquired of Siemens AG for approx. $1.5 billion. He also led the first wave of VoIP technology as vice president of worldwide sales and service at Picazo Communications Inc., an IP telephone company sold to Intel Corporation. More recently James was a senior executive for Cyan, a leader in software-defined networks (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) orchestration acquired by Ciena.
“Wedge Networks has developed truly compelling cloud security and orchestration solutions that embody the spirit of new SDN and NFV frameworks,” said Mr. Hamilton. “I believe our cloud-based security software addresses critical gaps in conventional security frameworks, and our open, multi-vendor, software approach is an attractive alternative to the proprietary hardware-intensive conventional approach.”
Jeff Wilson, Principal Security Analyst from IHS said: “Hamilton has a proven background in building highly successful and innovative security companies like TippingPoint. I look forward to tracking his progress helping Wedge Networks capitalize on the rapidly-expanding cloud security opportunity.”
Dr. Hongwen Zhang, former chief executive (CEO) and co-founder, actively recruited James to his former role and will continue on as CTO, with a primary focus on leading product development. “I am absolutely thrilled to have James join us as CEO,” said Dr. Zhang. “He is a world class leader in the security and networking industry. His market insight and input as board member have been incredibly valuable these past few years. Having him lead our team will help us to accelerate our market success and achieve our full potential.”
Wedge Networks are also today launching the addition of WedgeIQ™, an integrated multi-technology threat intelligence engine, to its revolutionary Cloud Network Defense™ security platform. Wedge Networks will be showing real-time security services running with WedgeIQ and using Network Functions Virtualization for Security (NFV-S) on the Phonoscope LightWave network as Proof of Concept (PoC) demonstrations at the MEF GEN15 Conference Dallas, Texas, Nov. 16-19, 2015.
