Venture-capital firm Mayfield Fund on Thursday named Sandeep Johri as its new executive in residence and said he will use his long experience in enterprise software to drive the VC’s strategy in that arena.
Johri has a long resume. He is a director at Dinghana, and served as a top executive at several Silicon Valley companies, including at Hewlett-Packard where he served as a VP for both cloud computing and enterprise strategies. There, he helped drive HP’s $ 4.5 billion acquisition of Mercury Interactive in 2006 and its $ 1.4 billion buyout of Opsware the following year. Those acquisitions are now a key part of HP’s enterprise software and systems management business.
Before that, Johri founded Oblix, an identity management specialist, subsequently acquired by Oracle. He also had stints at Silicon Graphics and Gemini Consulting, and actually was an entrepreneur in residence at Mayfield from 2001 to 2003.
In a statement, Johri said, “I look forward to partnering with Mayfield to uncover big opportunities such as identifying how big data analytics can be targeted at specific industry segments like telecom and financial services.”
Recent research indicates some VCs and private equity firms aren’t confident enterprise software as a category has huge growth potential. Moves like this one shows at least some VCs believe that to be false.
Menlo Park, Calif.-based Mayfield has more than $ 2.7 billion under management and typically invests in early-stage companies. Mayfield currently has investments in Couchbase, Appcelerator, Marketo and StorSimple, all of which show an enterprise software focus. In the past, it has taken stakes in 3PAR, now owned by HP, LSI , and Riverbed Technology .
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
- Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
- The Case for Increased M&A in 2011: Actions and Outlooks
- Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
