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Leadership Team

Our management team is leading the company to new heights. Focused and dedicated, these industry pioneers are passionate about delivering on product promises and evangelizing the value of application performance engineering.

Gary Jackson
Chairman and CEO

Taking command of a company is always exciting, but becoming CEO of Shunra is something special. This company has the kind of opportunity that doesn’t come along very often, and I’m here to make sure we take advantage of it.

What I’ve learned in more than 25 years of executive leadership, most recently as CEO at Ounce Labs, is that being the best at what you do is only part of the battle for success. The next step is understanding the value of what you do and communicating it to the world. The rest is delivering on the promise, in a way that is easily absorbed by the technology community.

Application performance engineering systems have been around in various forms for over ten years, but the impact of using these systems at a strategic level is only just beginning to be realized. My biggest responsibility is to articulate, share and drive our vision of what Shunra is bringing to enterprise IT and e-commerce - not just a best practice or even a gold standard, but a must-have, an integral element for successful business operations. Shunra’s ability to show the world’s great companies exactly how their distributed applications will function before those applications are actually deployed is unique. They see immediately, and are able to trust the performance of their applications before the end users ever see them. Furthermore, our ability to help diagnose performance problems with production applications can be even more critical, because those applications are often the lifeblood of our customers, and getting to the root cause carries the greatest urgency. If I do my job well, we will bring this industry to the point that companies will consider it an obvious, automatic procedure to “Shunra” their new applications before deploying them to their end users.

Shunra has been delivering successful products and services to enterprise IT and e-commerce for over a decade, and even with 2000 customers, we have only scratched the surface. We’re going to give everyone connected with Shunra – customers, partners, employees and investors alike – a clear view into the glowing future of a great company. And that’s a vision I cannot wait to share.
Bill Varga
Chief Operations Officer

I’ve spent my entire professional life building sales organizations and developing new business, and joining Shunra in 2010 has given me the opportunity to leverage all that experience with a company that can really change the landscape. Having worked with Gary Jackson in several previous iterations, I know we share a vision for Shunra, and it’s exciting to make it real on a daily basis.

And reality is what Shunra is all about. Our customers understand the business value of taking real-world application performance impairments and integrating testing throughout the development process, and my team and I are having a wonderful time spreading that message. In my previous executive sales and business development positions at Ounce Labs, Quova and Interact Commerce, I developed strategies and partnerships that popularized – and monetized – innovative software solutions to challenging business problems. Shunra is the biggest opportunity yet to execute those strategies – we have the best solution in the world to make companies confident in how well their distributed applications will perform prior to deployment, and once they gain that confidence, they’re long-term customers. My job is to make sure, through our people and our partners, that they get the word.
Chris Hughes
Chief Financial Officer

Shunra is special because it’s a company with an outsized influence on the industry. We’re delivering huge value to our customers in a specialized area that is an absolute necessity to their business operations, and I see the potential for explosive growth in the next year or two. I’ve been in the tech space for 18 years and executive management for 15, but I’ve never had the opportunity to have such an important impact on a company’s success and make such a significant difference in the industry, and I’m enjoying it tremendously.

In my previous role as CFO for Planalytics, I built the financial team, raised capital and worked on acquisitions, but the best part of my current position is being involved in every aspect of Shunra’s business operations –- not just the financial reporting, but sales, operations, legal, and HR. I take great satisfaction in both building and supporting the financial and operational infrastructure for an exciting, fast-growing technology company, and I consider myself an unusually revenue-focused CFO in that I don’t just crunch the numbers, I actually help make them happen.
Todd DeCapua
VP, Channel Operations

I was first introduced to Shunra five or six years ago, in my previous role as IT Group Leader at ING DIRECT, and in minutes understood the significance of what the Shunra solutions offer from a business value perspective. In short, I came to a quick recognition that all the performance tests and results I had done for the previous 10 years without using Shunra was inaccurate (and of limited benefit to my business customer) given the lack of incorporating real world conditions into the lab. After partnering closely with Shunra for four years, and inadvertently becoming a champion for ‘how to’ apply the technology and practices to solve business problems, I was excited to join this team as an employee in 2010.

Now I have the amazing opportunity to work with multiple customers every day, helping them quickly resolve their biggest and most difficult performance challenges and enable them achieve their business goals. More than 40% of the time, companies will bring us a problem they have been struggling with for months, and we solve it for them in a matter of days. So, the quality of delivery required of our consultants is second to none. I am responsible for delivering that level of quality, and the prospect of facing challenges like that every day and coming up with creative solutions is what most excites me about my job.

I have been doing this professionally for 15 years, in both a full-time employee capacity and consulting to over 73 organizations, and have never seen an opportunity like the one we have today. Shunra provides a unique capability to make systems, computers and applications interact with each other, and the time for what we do is right now. The marketplace is ready for us at this moment because of the accelerated growth and demands of technology, and knowing that – and knowing that our competition cannot hold a candle to what we do – makes Shunra an exhilarating place to be right now.
Amichai Lesser
VP, International Sales and Services

I joined Shunra in 2002 as a software engineer, and I have seen the company grow from a young startup to a solution provider for the world's largest and most complex organizations. I have previously managed Shunra’s product marketing, consulting and channels before assuming my current position as VP of international sales and services.

I view my responsibility as helping clients avoid the cost associated with poorly performing applications across Mobile, Cloud, WEB and WAN networks by implementing Application Performance Engineering as a policy across the organization. Our vision comes true every time a client leverages Shunra’s technology and best practices to release fast performing applications and by doing so avoids costs, increases revenue and improves brand equity. Watching this happen with greater frequency and on a larger scale every day is the most gratifying aspect of my job.

Performance engineering is becoming more and more complex, with steep challenges ahead of us including mobile and cloud deployments, and as a Shunra veteran I take a particular pride in watching all the hard work and investments we’ve made over the years transform Shunra into an industry leader and pave the way for even greater successes.
Sharon Levin
VP, Support & Israel Operations

As employee number 9 at Shunra, I worked closely with the founders to develop the first appliance products the company ever shipped in 2000, when we were an unfunded startup with a handful of people. I also built our quality assurance infrastructure and our consulting business. The pride and excitement I felt back than are just as strong today, as I watch Fortune 2000 enterprises depend on our technology to achieve their success.

I manage Shunra’s customer support group and our manufacturing group. Our daily commitment is to deliver a fully working and stable product to every customer, and to provide the product support that will enable them to realize the maximum value from our technology. I define my primary responsibility as delivery and setup of the product for the customer, and I have the privilege of working with great people to make it happen. It’s enormously satisfying for all of us to see our customers using the Shunra technology and best practices developed over the past decade. And if a customer struggles with deploying a Shunra product or getting ideal functionality from it, it’s our response that ensures that every customer is a happy one. That’s deeply gratifying.  
Danny Moore
VP, Development

I am amazed, looking at the current market and accepted development best practices, by the number of companies that still do not consider the network as one of the biggest challenges to the performance of their applications. Many organizations operate under the wrong assumption that load testing is enough. Without incorporating real-world network impairments, load testing and other performance engineering efforts do not deliver reliable results. Over the last four-plus years I’ve been at Shunra, I’ve watched awareness of the impact of the network on application performance explode, but there is still a way to go. With the rapid move to the Cloud and mobile applications, I expect we will see this awareness grow even quicker. I am excited to watch this market transform, and am even more excited when I hear from our customers, those who have acted proactively to ensure application performance, about the impact we are making daily on their business and their end users.

Before joining Shunra, I worked in California with a consulting company that offered me the opportunity to interact with a variety of different sized development organizations. It was there that I saw developers, from companies of all sizes, taking for granted that if their code worked in the development environment it would also work in the field. At Shunra, our customers often come to us with performance issues that didn’t reveal themselves in testing or QA. As head of R&D at Shunra, I aim to help developers and performance engineers to write better networking-related code and to create a test environment that will yield accurate and predictive results. I want to provide these developers and performance engineers with the best and most innovative tools, along with the insight and best practices that I’ve been a part of, in order to best help them succeed in their job.
Marty Brandwin
VP, Marketing

I’ve been fortunate in my career. I’ve worked with and learned from some extremely talented technologists and marketers. Bringing my experience and knowledge to Shunra is a great opportunity for me, and while this is an exciting proposition for me personally, I’m more excited that I get to continue my “education” by working with the brightest and most dedicated team I’ve ever known.

Since I first had the opportunity to meet Gary Jackson, Bill Varga and the rest of the team assembled here, I’ve been impressed by both their commitment to their employees as well as their commitment to their customers. It was this commitment to customers that I found most compelling. Having come from the application performance monitoring space, I understood the value of finding and fixing application problems quickly once they occurred. Shunra, however, takes this concept further, believing its customers can realize even greater value and provide even better service if problems are detected and resolved pre-deployment. For me, the argument was logical. The execution on the vision, though, is unique.

This vision is not just about Shunra. It’s about a holistic discipline called Application Performance Engineering – a combination of process, resources, and capabilities that allow organizations to proactively ensure optimal levels of application performance – and the understanding that every test environment must reliably and accurately emulate the real-world conditions that affect end users. It’s about empowering organizations to take control of application performance and their end users’ experience. It’s about understanding what is important to your end users and delivering on those expectations. When you believe in a vision, when you see how your company is impacting other businesses and organizations around the world, it is easy to be passionate. In my role at Shunra, I share that passion with a team of marketers who are committed to effectively communicating this vision via traditional, online and social means, while demonstrating in concrete-terms the real-world value that our products and services provide.
Dave Berg
VP, Product Strategy

My career has taken me to companies of all shapes and sizes. The two themes I have always looked for were a hunger to do better and to provide measurable value. Since joining Shunra as a sales engineer in 2005, I have found both themes in abundance. One of the exciting parts of my job is being able to work throughout our business with motivated people who share a common vision.

Shunra has long been in the business of helping our customers address complex performance issues in a straightforward way that drastically shortens time to resolution and increases awareness of performance bottlenecks. Our unique approach to application performance engineering is a combination of technology and practical best practices forged from experience and a lot of success helping enterprises deploy with confidence. The other exciting part of my job is stewarding Shunra’s product direction to build the technology that will support that approach for many years to come.
Susan St. Clair
Sr. Director, Professional Services

Susan St. Clair is our Senior Director of Professional Services. With more than ten years practical industry experience in helping organizations design and test highly performing applications, Susan has extensive practical consulting experience around performance engineering and testing.