Blue Coat appoints Venkat Raghavan as Senior Vice President of Research and Development

Blue Coat Systems, Inc., the technology leader in Web security and WAN optimization solutions, announced that IBM veteran, Venkat Raghavan has joined as senior vice president of research and development. Venkat brings a 20 year track record of delivering world-class enterprise security products and market-leading innovation to Blue Coat.  Venkat will lead the company’s product management and research and development organization, and report directly to Blue Coat chief executive officer, Greg Clark. 

“Venkat arms Blue Coat to deliver a new class of security and optimization solutions to enterprises battling security and business operational risks created by shadow IT systems, applications moving to the cloud and the explosive adoption of BYOD,” said Greg Clark. “Blue Coat is aggressively expanding our executive team with results-driven executives like Venkat, who will redefine the way enterprises protect and optimize their systems, data and people.” 

“The boundaries of the extended enterprise are at risk with the lack of governance for the use of cloud-based systems, rich Internet applications and employees that bring their own devices to the workplace,” said Raghavan. “This, combined with the growing sophistication of malware and advanced persistent threats, creates the need for a new type of security system that protects the enterprise, as a highly mobile workforce demands anytime and anywhere access to corporate applications and data. I am very excited to join Blue Coat to lead innovation and deliver the next generation of security and optimization products to our customers.” 

According to the Blue Coat 2012 Web Security Report, companies confront an average of 5,000 Web threats each month. Those threats are increasing as malware targets expand from desktops and laptops to mobile devices.  One industry research report showed a 155 percent increase in malware activity across all mobile platforms in 2011. Enterprises now require new proactive user-based Web defenses, leading to the rapid adoption of the Blue Coat Cloud Service and Blue Coat^® ProxySG^® family of appliances. 

Prior to joining Blue Coat, Raghavan led engineering and development for IBM Internet Security Systems portfolio, where he was responsible for worldwide engineering and development of security software and hardware-optimized security appliances. Raghavan joined IBM through its acquisition of Dascom, where he was responsible for the security and storage product portfolios. Prior to IBM, Raghavan was senior technology architect at Freddie Mac and senior software engineer at Harris Corporation. 

Raghavan holds an M.B.A. in marketing from GeorgeWashingtonUniversity, an M.S. in Computer Science from ClemsonUniversity, and a B.E. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from PSG College of Technology.