LiveAction's CEO post has quietly shifted from Walter Scott to Brooks Borcherding, ChannelE2E has confirmed, and the company's network performance monitoring platform is gaining attention as an SD-WAN enabler.
Borcherding joined LiveAction in February 2018 as president and now takes on the CEO role. Scott remains chairman of the company. Both executives have extensive experience in the MSP software monitoring market. Borcherding previously held executive-level posts at Datto and NaviSite. And Scott previously built and sold LogicNow to SolarWinds MSP; he's also currently CEO of Logtrust, a data operations platform provider.
So what does the future hold for LiveAction? The latest answers surfaced last week during Cisco Partner Connection Week 2018, which Borcherding attended. LiveAction's LiveNX software, Borcherding says:
- Accelerates the value of Cisco DNA Center and Software-Defined Access (SD-Access);
- improves visual analytics and service assurance of Cisco SD-WAN; and
- provides reporting on the performance of Apple iOS devices and apps running on Cisco enterprise environments.
Painting a Multi-Vendor Picture
Still, this is more than a Cisco and SD-WAN story. The LiveAction software portfolio -- spanning LiveNX and LiveSP -- allows customers and service providers to visualize the performance of their current networks, while charting a path to effective SD-WAN services and cloud services.
With the broader industry in mind, LiveAction's software integrates with scores of third-party products. But the company believes the highly fragmented SD-WAN market has reached a tipping point, thanks to 2017 M&A deals like Cisco acquiring Viptela and VMware acquiring VeloCloud, Borcherding notes.
Market researchers tend to agree. The SD-WAN market is expected to reach $9.06 billion by 2021, up from $738.9 million in 2016, according to Markets and Markets. That’s a lofty compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 65.11 percent, the researcher says.
LiveAction Business Priorities
Amid that growth opportunity, Borcherding's top two priorities for 2018 are succinct. They involve:
- Helping partners and customers to gain 'visual assurances' that they're properly designing, deploying and running their next-generation networks. LiveAction's software fulfills that need, he says, because it provides real-time and continuous insight of network traffic based on application and user-level activity.
- Building a scalable business that can execute. For clues on how he might do that, check out Borcherding's experience managing these four levers of growth.
No doubt, the overall network management and SD-WAN markets are flooded with management tools. But there's also plenty of opportunity ahead. Toss in the need to manage networks across public clouds and on-premises systems, and the potential upside is even higher, Borcherding says.
