William McCormick
Craig McCullough, senior vice president of public sector business with Riverbed, recently spoke with ExecutiveBiz about joining the company, his strategic goals as well as how he is addressing the unique challenges of talent recruitment in the federal sector and innovating the capabilities for their customers during the latest Executive Spotlight interview.
“From a workforce perspective, I personally believe it is difficult to recreate the camaraderie and collaboration created by working, in person, with your team on a daily basis. In my opinion, there are creative and inspiring forces in play when people are working together in the same physical space, which cannot be duplicated through a remote or virtual environment.”
You can read the full interview with Craig McCullough below:
ExecutiveBiz: Congrats on recently becoming the Public Sector SVP for Riverbed. Why did you want to join the company? What do you hope to accomplish?
Craig McCullough: “I joined Riverbed in January, but I’ve known of Riverbed from my two decades in this industry. Optimization and acceleration is where the company has really made its mark. However, Riverbed has recently made a powerful move into Observability, which is a natural evolution given its place in the acceleration and optimization market.
Previously, I was working for a cybersecurity company where I created, managed and grew its public sector business. It was during the early days of the pandemic that I learned about Riverbed acquiring Aternity and the company’s anticipated rebrand.
Riverbed was moving into the observability market and leveraged their existing footprint to do so. Riverbed brought observability to existing clients, allowing those clients to recapture the value of previously acquired IT assets while simultaneously reducing their clients’ overall technical debt. Riverbed is a game changer in the observability market. I realized there is a tremendous opportunity with them.
The tipping point for me in deciding to join Riverbed was after I became educated on what would become Alluvio by Riverbed. There is no other technology in existence that can offer the actionable insights and intelligent automation that Alluvio by Riverbed can provide.
Riverbed is now able to provide full fidelity telemetry, intelligent analytics, automated remediation of common issues and allow for analytics and forensics across a client’s entire IT infrastructure.
Riverbed captures every packet and every flow to provide full fidelity observability for every application over any network for every device and any user. All of this created a can’t miss opportunity for me to help grow Riverbed’s game changing observability business. Every day is exciting.
As far as what I would like to accomplish, I want to educate our public sector clients as quickly and efficiently as possible on what Riverbed can provide in order to support their overall mission goals.
Long-term, I want to understand from our clients what technical alliances Riverbed should make with other technology providers to create multi-vendor solutions that will bring mission critical capabilities to those clients. I’ve been in the public sector my entire career and I have learned that there is more value to public sector clients when industry can offer full solutions as compared to point products.
This often requires partnering and collaboration with many technology partners who each bring a unique capability or capabilities to create a valuable multi-vendor solution, which caters to each client’s individual mission or goal.”
ExecutiveBiz: How will the recent changes brought on by the pandemic shift the technical and logistical challenges of recruiting in the federal landscape and continue to advance your technical capabilities for your customers?
Craig McCullough: “At a very basic level, the general lack of preparedness for hybrid work environments across every industry was magnified or highlighted by the pandemic.
From a technology perspective, no industry, company, employer or public sector entity escaped the sudden and stark realization that they were completely unprepared from a technology perspective, to deal with the world essentially shutting down seemingly overnight.
It took a tremendous amount of work, sacrifice and unprecedented partnerships between industry and the public sector to allow for what ultimately amounted to a technology pivot allowing our clients to effectively deal with previously unforeseen circumstances. Many of these partnerships resulted in amazing solutions that ultimately won the day and continue to enhance the technology we bring to the public sector.
From a workforce perspective, I personally believe it is difficult to recreate the camaraderie and collaboration created by working, in person, with your team on a daily basis. In my opinion, there are creative and inspiring forces in play when people are working together in the same physical space, which cannot be duplicated through a remote or virtual environment.
I think we’ve all lost a little bit of that connectivity that made the game fun and provided a lot of benefits of working with your peers that made you appreciate coming to work every day. There was a strong connection that drove people to overachieve because they were close with their co-workers.
At the end of the day, people are looking for more than just a computer screen. At Riverbed, we are very aware of this. We still have our screen time, but we also try to have a few days a week in the office. We are also planning company events outside of work in an effort to strengthen those bonds that are formed when we are together.
It’s just a different experience that can’t be recreated over any screen. I don’t think we’ll ever go back to how office work was before and I don’t mean that in a negative way at all. We have been able to make significant advancements around the technology we’re using to collaborate across greater distances. In time, the answer will be a healthy balance of both technology and office time.”
