Guavus Appoints a New CEO

Big data firm Guavus has a new big cheese. 

The company has hired Manish Goel as CEO, announcing Monday that the former NetApp exec was hand-picked by Guavus founder and former CEO Anukool Lakhina, who will stay on “to focus on innovation” as the company expands to more markets.

Goel spent 11 years at storage and data management company NetApp, most recently as EVP of product operations.

He’ll take the reins of a company founded in 2006 that has raised $87 million. Lakhina, meanwhile, will stay active with the direction of Guavus’ technology, while also supporting sales and corporate development.

In June, the company acquired Pipeline, a product originally developed by Applied Broadband that collects and analyzes IPDR (Internet Protocol Detailed Records) from cable modem termination systems (CMTSs).  At the time, the company said it had licensing deals with seven of the top 10 North  American cable operators, but declined to name them. Marwan Fawaz, a partner of Sarepta Advisors and the former head of Motorola Home and the ex-CTO of Charter Communications, is a member of Guavus’ panel of industry advisors.

Guavus said it also has deals with three of the top four North American mobile operators as customers.

Guavus collects and analyzes information from a variety of sources, including customer care, deep packet inspection and interactive voice response (IVR) platforms, and feeds that data into “decisioning applications” that marketers can then use to uncover new revenue-driving opportunities.

In the cable world, for example, that data could be used to help MSOs identify heavy Internet users and create targeted, higher-end speed packages or cloud-based storage services for that particular segment of the customer base.

“Guavus is at the heart of a fundamental shift in the industry where social, mobile, cloud and big data analytics are converging to create unprecedented levels of business agility,” Goel said in a release. “They are already established as the market leader for big data analytics for the Communications Service Provider (CSP) industry and have an enormous opportunity to be a multi-billion dollar business across enterprise markets globally.”