Aviatrix appoints Doug Merritt as Chairman, CEO, and President

Aviatrix announced the appointment of Doug Merritt as CEO and President. He will also join the Aviatrix Board of Directors as Chairman.

Merritt will succeed Steve Mullaney, who for the past four years has built Aviatrix into an industry-defining enterprise cloud networking and network security company.

Merritt was previously CEO and President of Splunk. During Merritt’s six-year tenure as CEO, he led significant shifts in the company’s technology roadmap, financial model, and go-to-market approach — dramatically increasing Splunk’s market capitalization. Under Merritt’s leadership, Splunk grew revenues from the equivalent of $100 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) to nearly $3 billion in 2022.

“I’ve worked alongside Doug throughout much of his career and have watched him become one of the most successful and respected enterprise CEOs with an incredible reputation for driving growth by delivering customer value,” said Nick Sturiale, Aviatrix Board Member and Managing Partner at Ignition Partners.

Merritt joins Aviatrix at a pivotal time for enterprises as they migrate business-critical systems onto public cloud infrastructure. However, cloud costs, security limitations, operational complexity, and staff skills pose challenges for even the most innovative businesses. Aviatrix is trusted by over 500 enterprise customers to directly address each of these challenges.

Aviatrix reduces operational complexity by delivering consistent cloud networking, security, and automation in and across all clouds to dramatically reduce deployment complexity and time to problem resolution. Aviatrix improves security with its Distributed Cloud Firewall, leveraging a modern, distributed system approach to cloud network security, rather than repurposing last generation data center technology.

“In my due diligence, it became evident that Aviatrix is leading the creation of a massive new category and that Fortune 500 companies already view Aviatrix as their trusted partner for secure cloud networking,” said Merritt. “I’m grateful to Steve for instituting a ‘customer for life’ mentality, backed by an incredible team, committed to driving innovation while putting customers first. I look forward to leading the next phase of what is emerging as an iconic enterprise infrastructure company.”