SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 27, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- CloudPassage today announced that the company has appointed industry veteran Robert Thomas as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and member of the Board of Directors. Thomas has been at the forefront of the security technology industry, and brings more than 25 years of executive experience creating, building and managing profitable enterprise technology businesses. Most recently, Thomas served as CEO for global network control company Infoblox (NYSE: BLOX).

Carson Sweet, CloudPassage's founding CEO, will serve as board chairman and take an operating role as Chief Strategy Officer, focusing on long-term product, market and technical strategy.

"The entire CloudPassage team is delighted that Robert has chosen to join us at this juncture," said Sweet. "His industry knowledge and proven track record of rapidly scaling successful technology companies like NetScreen and Infoblox, made him the ideal candidate. 2015 is poised to be another high-growth year for CloudPassage, so Robert's business talents will be put to good use, right out of the gate. I look forward to working side-by-side with him in both my role as board chairman and as Chief Strategy Officer. "

"I'm extremely excited to be joining CloudPassage. Deployment of private and hybrid clouds is growing rapidly, and will continue to accelerate for the foreseeable future," said Robert Thomas. "Securing these dynamic environments is difficult, but of utmost importance. CloudPassage has developed a solution that is innovative, unique and way ahead of anyone else in the market. I'm pleased that so many large organizations deploy the Halo platform, and I look forward to participating in CloudPassage's success by taking the company to the next level."

Thomas spent a decade as CEO of Infoblox, growing the company from a high-potential start-up into a large, highly profitable public business. When he joined, the company had fewer than 50 employees and roughly $5 million in annual revenue. Under his leadership, Infoblox raised $70 million in venture capital, built strong brand awareness, delivered market-leading products and enjoyed long-term business success. Thomas and his team took the company public in 2012 at a valuation of $1.3 billion.

Prior to Infoblox, Thomas served as president and CEO of NetScreen Technologies, a network security company he took public in 2001 at a valuation of 1.5 billion and which was later sold to Juniper Networks in 2004 for $4.2 billion. As NetScreen's CEO, Thomas raised three rounds of financing -- approximately $80 million -- to help scale the business.

Earlier in his career, Thomas held a variety of senior management positions at Sun Microsystems, Fujitsu and ICL. His appointment to CloudPassage is effective March 19, 2015.

About CloudPassage

CloudPassage is the leader in software-defined security (SDSec) with a mission of addressing two top inhibitors to cloud infrastructure adoption--security and compliance. The patented, award-winning CloudPassage Halo platform is the industry's only software-defined security solution purpose-built to handle the dynamic nature of public, private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments, in addition to traditional hardware and virtualized data centers. Halo operates seamlessly across these environments to automate and orchestrate a broad set of critical security and compliance controls. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, CloudPassage is backed by Benchmark Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, Tenaya Capital, Shasta Ventures, Musea Ventures and other leading investors. For more information, visit www.cloudpassage.com.

Press Contact: Amanda Felix, afelix@sterlingpr.com, (408) 884-5162

CloudPassage® and Halo® are registered trademarks of CloudPassage, Inc.

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SOURCE CloudPassage