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Ayla Networks Names Four Vice Presidents to Management Team
[February 15, 2018]

Ayla Networks Names Four Vice Presidents to Management Team


Ayla Networks, a global leader in Internet of Things (IoT) platform-as-a-service (PaaS), recently named four new executives to its management team.

Ashish Agrawal has been hired to the position of senior vice president of engineering; Farooq Khan to vice president of development and operations (DevOps); Sahir Sait to vice president of product management, and Russ Keveryn to vice president of strategic sales.

Ashish Agrawal to Steer Ayla's Engineering Efforts

In his new position, Agrawal oversees the IoT platform device, mobile and cloud engineering efforts at Ayla.

Agrawal comes to Ayla from Flipkart, an electronic commerce company based in Bangalore, India. He headed the engineering for Flipkart's customer shopping experience-including the mobile site and apps, the desktop site, search platform, product recommendations and personalization, as well as the merchandising, advertising and order-placement platforms. Prior to Flipkart, Agrawal was a long-time software and technology leader at Amazon and also served as chief technology officer at two companies: Sirqul in Seattle and Micromax Informatics in India.

"Ashish has a reputation for out-of-the-box thinking to come up with solutions to technology challenges, and the fact that he holds 25 patents is an example of that creativity," said Jonathan Cobb, Ayla's chief operating officer. "His is just the sort of talent we need to move our IoT platform to the next level."

Agrawal graduated from Columbia University in New York with a master's degree in electrical engineering (MSEE), and from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi with a bachelor's degree in computer science.

Farooq Khan to Spur Ayla's DevOps Practice

Khan assumes the newly created position of Ayla's vice president of DevOps engineering.

Before joining Ayla, Khan was heading hosting operations for ARRIS, a teecommunications company, out of their Santa Clara offices. Before ARRIS he worked for Pace, a consumer electronics company based in the UK. He joined Pace in 2010 and was promoted to vice president in 2014.



For 10 years before moving to Pace, Khan was director of integrated systems engineering and solution architecture for 2Wire (acquired by ARRIS), a home networking pioneer company. From 1993-2000, he was director of professional services at Thinque Systems.

"Farooq is known as a top-notch technical architect, a customer-focused manager and an effective team leader," Cobb said.


Khan holds an MSEE degree from California State University in Northridge and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from NED University of Engineering and Technology in Karachi, Pakistan.

Sahir Sait to Direct Product Development at Ayla

Sait is responsible for managing the development of Ayla's portfolio of IoT platform products.

Sait joins Ayla from Google, where he spent five years working across Google's display and search ads ecosystem, including the AdMob, DoubleClick (News - Alert) and Adsense products. Most recently, he ran product technology management for Google's Mobile Ads publisher business, where he focused on ensuring a healthy ecosystem, driving platform competitiveness and reducing operational cost.

Prior to Google, Sait worked for Pace (before it was acquired by ARRIS) as director of product for management platforms. He was responsible for product strategy, execution and market adoption of Pace's service and device management product portfolio. Before Pace, he spent five years with Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert), driving customer experience solutions for large telecommunications providers.

"Sahir's experience at Google and Pace-building high-impact scalable software products in the enterprise and consumer internet space-will be invaluable to Ayla," said Cobb.

Sait graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor's degree in business administration.

Russ Keveryn to Introduce IoT Benefits to Telecom Market

Keveryn heads up Ayla's sales expansion into new market areas, beginning with telecommunications service providers.

Like Khan and Sahir, Keveryn is an alumnus of Pace/ARRIS, where he led the telco sales initiative and served as vice president of sales between 2013 and 2018. During the final two years of his tenure, he was responsible for delivering hardware, software and services exclusively to AT&T for its Uverse broadband and DirecTV (News - Alert) video services.

"Russ understands the needs of telecom companies, and he has a solid reputation for serving customers as a strategic partner rather than a mere vendor," said Cobb.

From 1999-2013, Keveryn held sales or business-development positions at Phunware Inc., TouchCommerce, 2Wire, Alcatel-Lucent and Trilogy. Previously, he worked as a software developer and consultant.

Keveryn earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

About Ayla Networks

Ayla Networks, a global IoT platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider, enables the world's largest companies to connect and ingest data from nearly any sensor, system and cloud. By leveraging Ayla's Agile (News - Alert) IoT™ platform, customers are able to quickly productize future-proofed, connected products, while normalizing data for ongoing insights and analytics. Ayla is a member of the elite Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS) Partner Network, so all products and data using the Ayla IoT cloud gain the security and availability benefits of the AWS cloud infrastructure. For more information, visit www.aylanetworks.com.


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