Veriflow Adds New Board Member and Vice President of Products

Computer Science Visionary Scott Shenker and Product Veteran Sajid Awan to Help Accelerate Product Innovation and Company Growth


OAKLAND, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 26, 2016) -  Veriflow, the network breach and outage prevention company, today announced the appointment of Scott Shenker to its Board of Directors and of Sajid Awan as vice president of products. The addition of these two product and computer networking veterans will help accelerate the company's technological innovation and growth.

"Scott and Sajid together have decades of experience in the areas of advanced networking, cloud computing and security," said James Brear, president and CEO of Veriflow. "Their combined strengths will bolster our technology leadership in the burgeoning area of mathematical network verification, help us penetrate new markets quickly and drive company profitability."

Veriflow launched out of stealth on April 5, with $2.9 million in initial investor funding from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense. The company's software, which is designed for CISOs, network architects, engineers and operators, uses mathematical network verification, which is based on the principles of formal verification, to bulletproof today's most complex networks. Veriflow's patented technology, including a best-practice library of network security and correctness policies, provides solutions across the multi-billion-dollar networking market to minimize the security breaches and costly disasters that can result from network vulnerabilities.

Scott Shenker
Scott is a true visionary in the world of networking technology. He has received the two highest awards in computer networking, the ACM SIGCOMM Award and the IEEE Internet Award, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the ACM and IEEE. Scott is the Carl J. Penther Professor of Engineering in the EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and serves as chief scientist at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley (ICSI). Scott continues to research and publish, and his work is among the most cited across all of computer science.

Scott co-founded and served as founding CEO and chief scientist of Nicira, which pioneered software-defined networking technology and was sold to VMware for $1.26B in 2012. He is also a co-founder and board member of Databricks, a leading data analytics firm. In 2011, Scott helped co-found the Open Networking Foundation, which promotes the adoption of software-defined networking.

Scott holds a Ph.D. in physics and an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago.

Sajid Awan
Sajid brings more than 20 years of experience in product management, systems engineering and operations in the areas of networking, cloud computing, security and information technology. At Veriflow, he is responsible for all aspects of product strategy and rollout and reports to James Brear, the company's president and CEO.

Prior to joining Veriflow, Sajid was country leader at IBM Global Services, where he was responsible for the company's consulting services. Before joining IBM, Sajid was CIO at MCB Bank, where he led IT infrastructure and operations that spanned 1,100 branches nationwide. Earlier, Sajid was the vice president of global field operations at Force10 Networks, which was acquired by Dell in 2011. During his tenure at Force10, Sajid led product management and worldwide field engineering and helped the company grow from pre-revenue to over $160 million per year.

Sajid holds a master's degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University and is a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE).

About Veriflow
Veriflow is the first networking company to use formal verification to eliminate change-induced network outages and breaches. The company's mathematical network verification technology gives organizations the confidence to make changes by eliminating risks associated with modifying the network. The software also ensures network policy correctness and sends alerts whenever any change that may impact the network is detected, including intentional changes due to insider sabotage. The company was created by a team of computer science professors and Ph.D. students in the EnterpriseWorks incubator at the University of Illinois, and is backed by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Defense. Veriflow has already demonstrated success in multiple Fortune 500 and government networks. The company is headquartered in Oakland, California, and has a development center in Champaign, Illinois. To learn more, visit http://www.veriflow.net/ and follow us on Twitter @veriflowsystems.  

Contact Information:

Press Contact
Rick Popko
10Fold for Veriflow
(415) 800-5381