Evolven | Leadership - Meet Our Experienced Team and Discover Our Strategies

• Sasha Gilenson - Chief Executive Officer, co-founder

• Gad Cohen - Chief Operating Officer, co-founder

• Eyal Oz - Vice President, R&D, co-founder

• Boštjan Kaluža, PhD - Chief Data Scientist

• John Reuben - Vice President of Sales

• Scott Stradley - Vice President of Global Solutions

• Kristi Perdue - Vice President of Marketing

Sasha Gilenson is Founder and CEO of Evolven Software and is paving the way as an expert leader in IT Operations Analytics (ITOA), addressing the 15-year chronic change and configuration challenges that have undermined performance and availability in IT operations.

 

Prior to founding Evolven in 2007, Sasha spent 13 years with Mercury Interactive (acquired by HP), managing the QA organization and participating in establishing Mercury Interactive's Software as a Service (SaaS). Sasha played a key role in the development of Mercury Interactive's worldwide Business Technology Optimization (BTO) strategy and drove field operations of the Wireless Business Unit, all while taking on the duties as the Mercury Interactive's top "guru" in quality processes and IT practices domain.

 

In this capacity, Sasha advised numerous Fortune 500 companies on technology and process optimization, and in turn, acquired a comprehensive and rare knowledge of the market and industry practices. Sasha saw how many enterprises were frustrated with critical business systems going down or underperforming, repeatedly seeing how complexity and gaps in IT operations created problems that no technology filled. Looking at these issues from a new perspective, he envisioned a revolutionary approach for handling the overwhelming and dynamic data that IT teams confront in maintaining performance and availability of their business operations. Sasha founded Evolven to apply a new analytics approach to resolve these chronic change & configuration challenges and dramatically minimize the risk of downtime and slash incident investigation time. Evolven's IT Operations Analytics provides intelligent answers to key IT operations challenges: how to accelerate incident resolution, avoid harmful and risky changes, and assess and optimize IT operations performance.

 

The innovative solution developed at Evolven has been praised and recognized by leading industry analysts:

• EMA senior analysts, Dennis Drogseth and Charlie Betz, reported on Evolven as the "Most adaptive change management analytics."
• Forrester's Vice President and Principal Analyst, Jean-Pierre Garbani recognized Evolven as an "Effective solution that provides immediate results."
• Roy Illsley, Vice President at Ovum declared that Evolven "transforms change and configuration management."

Sasha was named a Finalist in the 2011 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® New Jersey Award. 

 

Sasha's insights and observations have appeared in leading industry resources:

• Blended Analytics: The Secret Sauce of ITOA, Inside Big Data
• Smashing the Silos with Blended Analytics, CM Crossroads
• Blended Analytics: That's What's Next for IT Mgmt,Information Management
• Breaking The Limitations Of Silos With Blended Analytics, Business Computing World

Sasha holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Latvian University and MBA from London Business School.

Gad leads Marketing, Business Development and Product Startegy for Evolven. Gad has over 16 years of marketing and business development experience at high technology companies. Prior to joining Evolven, Gad provided strategic marketing services to start-up companies. Gad co-founded and served as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Prolify, a start-up company that delivers a dynamic process management solution, and he co-founded and served as President of Growth Wizards, Ltd., an international business development company. His previous experience includes executive business development and marketing positions at Business Layers (acquired by Netegrity Inc.), and Tesnet Group (IPO Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange).

 

Gad holds a Master's degree in Technology Management from New York's Polytechnic University and a Law degree from Bar Ilan University.

Bringing many years of software development and management experience to Evolven's recognized team of industry experts, Eyal has demonstrated management success across various development organizations – from startup to global enterprises. With a focus on execution and customer satisfaction, he adds a unique ability to translate customer needs and pains into new software products. Prior to joining Evolven, Eyal spent 12 years in various R&D roles at Mercury Interactive (acquired by Hewlett Packard [NYSE: HPQ] in 2007). Eyal's leadership was integral to the rollout of their leading products, contributing an innovative business-centric approach to managing applications. Eyal brings a deep knowledge in developing software solutions in the areas of change and configuration management, performance and availability monitoring. He holds BA degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel-Aviv University, Israel.

Boštjan Kaluža is the Chief Data Scientist at Evolven. He's also a hardcore researcher who's done a lot of research into artificial intelligence and intelligent systems, machine learning, predictive analytics and anomaly detection. Prior to Evolven, Boštjan served as a senior researcher in the Department of Intelligent Systems at the Jozef Stefan Institute, the leading Slovenian scientific research institution and led research projects involving pattern and anomaly detection, machine learning and predictive analytics.

Focusing on the detection of suspicious behavior and data analysis, Boštjan has published numerous articles in professional journals and delivered conference papers. In 2013, Boštjan published his first book on data science, Instant Weka How-to, exploring how to leverage machine learning using Weka. Boštjan recently published his second book, Practical Machine Learning in Java, for learning how to use Java's machine learning libraries to gain insight from data. Boštjan is also the author and contributor to a number of patents in the areas of anomaly detection and pattern recognition.

 

Boštjan earned his PhD at Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School in Ljubljana, Slovenia, rigorously defending a doctoral dissertation entitled Detection of Anomalous and Suspicious Behavior Patterns.

John is a sales and marketing professional with broad experience in both business systems and information technology toolsets. Leveraging over 30 years of experience, John has built the highest functioning sales teams helping technology startups secure customers and partners at companies like Oracle and Kintana.

 

In 2004, John founded Saving Teens In Crisis Collaborative (STICC), a non-profit enterprise assisting troubled teens and their families struggling with substance abuse and other emotional issues.

 

John is responsible for expanding Evolven's global sales footprint, including the development of all direct and indirect channels at Evolven.

Scott leads Evolven's technical go to market teams, consisting of PreSales and Customer Success. Scott has over 20 years of experience in technical solutions ranging from startup companies to large enterprises. Prior to joining Evolven, Scott was a Field CTO at BigPanda. He also held individual contributor and management level positions for data management, observability vendors, and overall AIOps solutions such as Informatica, xMatters, Netscout and HP/Mercury. Throughout his career, Scott has placed a primary focus on driving maximum value for his customers on both the business and technical side of the enterprise.

 

Scott holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science as well as Psychology from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor).

With more than 25 years of industry experience in security, data management, governance and compliance, Kristi brings her expertise to Evolven as the VP of Marketing. With a background in both startup and enterprise software, Kristi is focused on Evolven’s go-to-market strategy, the corporate brand, customer engagement, and revenue generation strategies for the company. Kristi has a history of building high functioning marketing teams, most recently as the CMO of Vaporstream and VP of Product Marketing at Viewpointe. She has also held executive positions at HP/Autonomy, CA Technologies, and Hummingbird, in the diverse areas of product marketing, product management, strategic alliances and international development management.

 

Kristi has advised and consulted with various entrepreneurial technology start-ups to implement successful go-to-market, sales and marketing strategies and holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Central Florida.