Polachi Recruits CEO for Progress
October 26, 2016 – Executive search firm Polachi Inc. has placed Yogesh Gupta as chief executive officer of NASDAQ-traded Progress. Phil Pead, the company’s CEO since 2012, is retiring but will continue to serve on the Progress board of directors.
Mr. Gupta was previously president and CEO of Kaseya, Inc., a leading IT management cloud software company, where he served from 2013 until 2015. As CEO, he defined a new growth strategy and led the company through a complete product and business transformation. He implemented a high-velocity sales process that led to the transition of an $80 million on premise and perpetual business to cloud and subscription.
Prior to Kaseya, Mr. Gupta was CEO at FatWire Software, until it was acquired by Oracle in 2011. During his time as CEO, FatWire became a leading independent web experience management software company. Earlier in his career, he was chief technology officer and chief strategist at Computer Associates, with whom he served from 1989 until 2007.
Top Shelf Talent
“Yogesh is clearly the right leader for Progress’ future,” said John R. Egan, chairman of the board of directors. “The board, as part of its annual succession planning, considered both internal and external candidates to find the best leader for our company and its employees, customers, partners and shareholders.” During the course of this review, he said, “we found an individual in Yogesh with a proven track record of delivering outstanding investor returns through innovative growth strategies and strong execution, making him an incredible fit for our company and the CEO to lead the company to the next level.”
“Yogesh is an incredible software industry veteran who had previously delivered double-digit annual revenue growth for a multi-billion dollar portfolio,” said Charley Polachi, a Polachi Access Executive Search partner. “We’re confident he’s the perfect fit for Progress.”
Making the decision to retire is never easy, said Mr. Lead, “but given the alignment of Yogesh’s skills and experience with the strides we have made as we prepare to exit 2016, I decided that this would be the right time for me to accelerate my retirement so that we could recruit Yogesh to lead the next phase of the growth of our company. I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Yogesh as our new CEO.” Mr. Pead will remain on the board of Progress.
“I’m incredibly excited to join the Progress team,” said Mr. Gupta. “Progress has that rare combination of a passionate customer and partner base, leading products, amazingly talented people, dedication to technology innovation, and momentum in the market. As we add capabilities for our customers and partners, deepen our enterprise presence, and further expand into the cloud, our mission remains unchanged — to enable developers to create the applications of tomorrow – ones that deliver engaging user experiences, leverage enterprise data, and run on the most scalable and reliable platform in the industry.”
Headquartered in Bedford, MA, Progress is a global provider of application development with offerings spanning web, mobile and data for on premise and cloud environments.
Polachi is a provider of executive recruiting services to technology, clean technology, private equity and venture capital companies. The firm recruits executive leaders for a company roster that includes Aspen Technology; Bottomline Technologies; Attunity; Cognizant Technologies; MAM Software; Trillium Software/Harte Hanks; FleetMatics; Lionbridge; Sparta Systems; Sevcon; Epsilon; Cognex; Plug Power; Mediamorph; Witricity; BlueConic; Perkins School; Knoa; and Visual IQ, among others.
Contributed by Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor, Hunt Scanlon Media
