Big Switch Goes 'Defensive' With New Sales Boss

SDN pioneer Big Switch Networks has named Gigamon veteran Mike Hoffman to head worldwide sales. Hoffman brings expertise in "defensive sales" to Big Switch, say his champions within the company.

Defensive sales involves focusing on existing customers with post-sales follow-up, ensuring customer satisfaction and providing support. Satisfied customers come back for additional sales, and they bring their friends. Defensive sales contrasts with traditional, offensive sales, which focuses efforts on landing new customers.

That "land and expand" model is particularly well-suited to Big Switch Networks , where initial sales are often $40,000, but customers can later extend that sale to $1 million or more, CEO Douglas Murray tells Light Reading.

"Instead of going after whales -- the $4 million to $5 million sale -- defensive sales is looking at the customer base, getting that initial insertion and using it as a beachhead to expand into the customer environment," Murray says.

Hoffman brings competitive experience to Big Switch, having worked as VP of worldwide sales at Gigamon Systems LLC . Big Switch's Big Monitoring Fabric is an enterprise network packet broker that competes with Gigamon.

At Gigamon, Hoffman helped increase revenue from $20 million to $140 million and positioned the company for its 2013 IPO. Big Switch is going through its own period of growth, claiming 300% expansion in 2015. (See CEO Chat With Gigamon's Paul Hooper.)

Big Switch's previous top sales guy was Shaun Page, formerly of Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR) -- Murray's previous employer -- who was hired as VP of worldwide sales in April, 2014. According to Page's LinkedIn profile, he left to join F5 Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: FFIV), heading up service provider sales, last month. (See Big Switch Poaches Sales VP From Juniper.)

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Founded in 2010, Big Switch specializes in "bare metal" SDN, serving enterprises and service providers that are migrating to cloud applications and seeking to emulate the agility and flexibility of hyperscale cloud providers such as Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Facebook . (See Big Switch: Networking Will Dance to Hypercloud Tune Next Year.)

In addition to Big Monitoring Fabric, Big Switch's other product is the Big Cloud Fabric, providing a networking layer to support VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) and OpenStack cloud workloads.

Big Switch announced a $48.5 million series C funding round in January, for a total $94 million since the company was founded in 2010. (See SDN Startup Big Switch Lands $48.5M Funding.)

— Mitch Wagner, , Editor, Light Reading Enterprise Cloud.