New Aryaka CEO Brings Sprint Enterprise Experience to SD-WAN

Aryaka’s new CEO says he wants to lead the company to its “next stage of growth.”

Matt Carter, the former Sprint vice president of enterprise and IoT, joined the SD-WAN provider this fall. One of his goals is to elevate a company that he calls “the best kept secret” of the industry.

Aryaka’s Matt Carter

“The good thing about Aryaka is that it’s a company that has a growing customer base,” Carter said. “It has a high-quality platform that we’re selling globally.”

Carter most recently served as CEO for Inteliquent, a Chicago-based unified communications company. He tells Channel Partners that his previous jobs, especially at Sprint, gave him a “a laboratory” of diverse customers and business challenges. He says he developed a strong inventory of knowledge that he’s now brought to Aryaka.

“I [spent] a lot of time with CIOs and other C-level executives, and they were all trying to figure out how to optimize this whole new world of cloud-based applications,” Carter said. “Getting their employees access to critical information anywhere around the globe.”

The trend of more and more applications going into the cloud is perhaps the biggest driver for the SD-WAN industry. Aryaka partnered with 8×8 last year to integrate with the UCaaS provider’s platform and has partnered with numerous cloud-based security providers.

Carter spoke highly of Aryaka’s channel partners, saying that the company is “interested in helping them help us make money.”

“At the end of the day, they want to know — if they’re going to give us mindshare, is this mindshare that will translate into helping them make money,” he said. “That’s really the core message here for the channel.”

Former president and CEO Shawn Farschi left Aryaka in August to lead Flype.  He led Aryaka for three years.

Ram Gupta, Aryaka’s chairman of the board, praised Carter’s “proven track record of guiding both public and private organizations through various stages of growth.” Aryaka has long been discussed as a likely candidate for an IPO.

“Matt’s expertise related to the networking, cloud and digital-technology industries is a huge benefit, as each sector aligns well with Aryaka’s business strategy, and we look forward to the next chapter of Aryaka’s success story,” Gupta said.

Aryaka’s executives have branded their company’s platform as a replacement for MPLS.