Lonergan Partners Fills Board Post for Infinera
October 30, 2015 – Redwood City, CA-headquartered executive search firm Lonergan Partners has recruited Rajal Patel as a member of the board of directors at Infinera. The search was led by partner Dotty Schaffer.
“The experience that Raj brings to the Infinera board will give them insight into the cutting edge technologies of the future,” said Ms. Schaffer.
Mr. Patel brings more than 20 years of experience in scaling cloud infrastructure for consumer Internet, SaaS, and other service providers globally. Since 2014, he has served as the head of cloud engineering at Pinterest. Prior to Pinterest, he was senior vice president for technical operations at Salesforce.com. Before that, he was VP for cloud services engineering at Cisco Systems and he has also held various engineering and management roles at Yahoo!
“We welcome Raj to our board. He has played key roles in building cloud network infrastructure at several major technology companies and brings a unique perspective on how end users, content providers, and network operators are transforming to stay ahead of this market,” said Kambiz Hooshmand, chairman of Infinera’s board. “His perspectives should be particularly useful as Infinera continues to introduce new solutions for cloud network operators.”
Infinera provides intelligent transport networks, enabling internet content providers and cloud network operators to scale bandwidth while accelerating service innovation and simplifying optical network operations.
Lonergan Partners focuses on the recruitment of CEOs and C-level executives for technology companies. The firm recently recruited Susanne D. Lyons and Joe Hoffman to the board of directors at Hercules Technology Growth Capital as well as Sudhakar Ramakrishna as a board director at Meru Networks.
Director recruiting has grown markedly more challenging in recent years. According to Egon Zehnder, the heightened expectations now placed on boards have elevated both the professional standards and personal commitment required of all directors.
At the same time, many boards find that the supply of independent-minded ‘board experienced’ directors – especially those who can add vital forms of specialized skills and expertise – is limited, as such candidates are both widely sought after and sometimes hesitant to take on the intensive responsibilities of board service today.
Contributed by Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor, Hunt Scanlon Media
