A Farewell to Aryaka

Aryaka Team –?

I’m writing to bid you farewell and wish each one of you and the company the very best on the road ahead.??

The past 3+ years have been a period of intense activity that has enrichened me and brought with it both learning and teaching moments, that I will savor and carry forward.??I am grateful to Matt and the board for giving me this opportunity.

When I joined the company in Jan 2019, the mandate was to bring together product management, marketing and sales development functions. It was challenging, but the opportunity to connect the dots and drive scale was exciting for me!?What boosted my confidence further was our technology, feedback from customers, our amazing support organization and an innate belief that we could transform things and play to our strengths.?

It has been a busy 3+ years. I recall Matt requesting me to present our strategy in front of the board about six weeks after I joined the company. What we put together, surprisingly earned their wholehearted endorsement and gave all of us a big boost to move forward with confidence.?In the months to come, we raised capital with Goldman Sachs coming in as the lead investor, brought in quality talent and began execution on multiple fronts.?While the strategy continued to evolve, it is gratifying, looking back to see we not just executed on what we presented, but also went above and beyond on multiple fronts.

A blur of activities followed - We refreshed our messaging to align with our core identity, our websites, expanded our product portfolio, built new partnerships, created a strong training and enablement program for our sellers and more recently the channel partners. In parallel, our ability to build a predictable marketing pipeline also got strengthened with weekly metrics, dashboards and operating plans bringing operational discipline. We developed partnerships and expanded deal sizes and broke into new security buying centers. As the pandemic hit, we quickly launched new products, initiated the hybrid workplace campaign and eventually ended up making our first acquisition in the company’s history, allowing us to become increasingly relevant in the SASE space. We were also fortunate to acquire Secucloud in the midst of the pandemic.

Meanwhile our customers continued to be with us as we became leaders in the Gartner peer review for the last two years (with hopefully a third one around the corner!). Our execution muscle continued to strengthen as we put out thought leadership assets, expanded our field marketing outreach with a structured cadence of programs and improved our brand awareness. Our websites went from one to six languages with beautiful visualization, our social media followership jumped 5X, our digital campaigns became more sophisticated and global, and we started rolling out targeted account-based marketing activities that are now expanding.

We went from having the highly regarded SmartConnect Global offering to Regional offerings, multi-cloud networking with SmartCloud, Private Access, LMS, Managed Firewall, EZ and Prime, among others, allowing us to upsell and attach, delivering more value to customers. It further allowed us to increase our relevance in deals and creating a better preference for our channel partners.?Our pricing flexibility improved and we devised ways to reduce friction and drive new consumption models with T-shirt sized pricing. All these were aligned with our "Cloud-First" principles. While doing this, we've also been quite efficient with our marketing spend, while placing emphasis on measurability and accountability.

The media and analyst coverage also expanded manifold over the years. Our “breakthrough” launch in Dec 2021 announcing the new EZ and Prime offerings, showed how we could punch way above our weight, including in the event we orchestrated. I am also excited about what we created with the new message, visuals, logo update, assets and websites that are very well aligned with the direction we are moving towards reflecting not just who we are, but what we want to be. Today, we have a strong team, an expanded portfolio, product strategy and marketing muscle that can hold its own if we continue to execute. We've expanded our addressable market with new offerings, targeting new buying persona, use-cases and sharpened our GTM thrust.

Eventually, transformation is never easy, and startups are hard. Every company goes through people churn, product pivots and market headwinds. The macro environment with the pandemic has helped certain companies, and posed challenges to others. Surprisingly, Aryaka has weathered a lot of these storms over the past 13 years and emerged stronger each time.

Despite the pandemic, despite competition, the company has not just survived, it has even thrived. Over the past three years, we have grown headcount, nearly doubled the ARR and we have expanded our wingspan in several areas to allow us to fly higher and further. This again is a testimony to the amazing technology and the people that constantly go above and beyond.

There is something steadfast, resilient, and resolute in the spirit of Aryaka that we can all draw inspiration from.?It takes a certain kind of tenacity and consistency to cross the $100M barrier in the enterprise space.

I’m certainly very proud of our collective accomplishments and incredibly thankful to my team as well as the entire organization at large, several of whom came together to collaborate and achieve some amazing milestones, some that we targeted for the first time. This can only happen with the right degree of partnership with all the organizations - sales, channel, engineering, finance, legal, HR and support, as well as the ELT.

I believe in leaving an organization better than the way I found it. Hopefully, that is the case. The best teams are those that don't miss you when you leave and function with minimal disruption. I'm very confident that the team I've helped build will more than meet that ask. While there is always more work to be done, collectively we have laid a foundation for the next set of leaders to take things to the next level in their own way.

Now the time has come to pass the baton. Some of my original responsibility is going to Dennis Monner the former CEO of Secucloud, and others to our new CPO, and some perhaps to others. I was fortunate to spend quality time with Dennis early on and think highly of his authentic leadership. On his part Dennis indicated that while they were attracted to Aryaka's marketing when they were an independent company, he appreciated it even more as an employee and found it "humming". I wish him and the commercial organization a very bright future and stellar outcomes and will be rooting for Aryaka from the sidelines.?

Finally, I've been fortunate to develop some great relationships with members across the company. I hope to stay in touch in the months and years ahead. Is a small world, and I am sure our paths will cross again.??

With best wishes and warm regards,

Shashi Kiran

Chief Marketing Officer