Aruba’s Executive Exodus: Soderlund Latest to Leave

Aruba Networks’ channel chief has left the building.

Karl Soderlund, vice president of Worldwide Channels at Aruba, left the company July 31 and has assumed the position of vice president of Channels and Alliances at Imperva, a web application firewall upstart based in Redwood Shores, California, according to sources close to the company.

The move was not entirely unexpected. Aruba announced in March it was being acquired by Hewlett-Packard, which shelled out a cool $2.7 billion for the wireless vendor. Shortly after the announcement, Aruba hosted its annual Atmosphere Conference, where the acquisition was the main topic of conversation for all attendees (and I questioned what would happen to the company once it had been swallowed).

Since then, a number of Aruba executives have left the company, including Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales John DiLullo, who moved to F5 Networks to head its worldwide sales organization. He is slated to start Aug. 31.

Other execs leaving Aruba in the past few months include the company’s chief marketing officer, Ben Gibson, who now fills the same position at Veritas/Symantec, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Soderlund joined Aruba in 2014 as VP of Worldwide Channels, following an almost two-year stint as VP of Americas Channels at Avaya. His departure was part of an exodus of Avaya execs during that time period, including worldwide channel chief John Spiliotis, who joined Palo Alto Networks, and senior vice president of Global Sales Tom Mitchell, who joined Violin Memory.

Soderlund was unavailable for comment at the time of this writing.