Virtana's Kash Shaikh Recognized By Comparably as Best CEO for Women and Diversity in 2022

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Jul 26, 2022, 09:00 ET

Customer-Obsessed Hybrid Cloud Management Provider Increases Female Employee Base from 16% to 26% In Last 18 Months

SAN JOSE, Calif., July 26, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Virtana, a leading provider of AI-driven monitoring solutions for hybrid cloud management, has been named as having one of the Best CEOs for Women and Diversity by Comparably based on feedback from women and employees of color at Virtana. The workplace culture site awards CEOs like Virtana's Kash Shaikh, who provide an employee-first culture with strong servant leadership values and benefits for women and minorities. In the last 18 months alone, Virtana's female employee base has grown from 16% to 26% of total employees.

Reviews on Comparably from more than half of Virtana employees give Kash an A+ rating as CEO, placing him in the top five percent of CEOs among similarly sized companies in the U.S.

Comparably's national awards program recognizes companies of all sizes for their strong leadership in fostering an inclusive environment for all employees. The 'Best CEO for Women' award is based solely on sentiment ratings provided by current female employees who anonymously rated their companies in 16 core workplace culture metrics during the previous 12 months. The 'Best CEO for Diversity' award is based on sentiment ratings from current employees of color in the previous 12 months. Winners were then determined based on CEO ratings, and scores were compared to other companies of similar size. This year, Virtana ranked 32^nd out of 100 — from nearly 15 million ratings across 70,000 companies.

Over the past two years, Kash has led Virtana through a tremendous evolution, all while delivering profitable financial growth. Virtana expanded its executive leadership team with the addition of Christina Richards as CMO, Kamelia Gouchev as SVP of Customer Success, and Kimberly Perryman as VP of People, paving the way for female leadership in both the company and industry at large. The company also added Eva Karnaukh, VP of Business Operations, Michelle Wright, VP & Corporate Controller, and Tara Garrett, VP of FP&A in extended leadership roles.

In response to the Comparably question, 'What do you like best about the leadership team,' one Virtana employee responded: "Our CEO is very good at picking the right executives and inspiring them to join Virtana to build a diverse team. We now have many women leaders in the executive team which I love."

Kash and the executive leadership team believe culture, values, and talent should evolve as much as a company's business and growth strategy. This is why the company underwent a profound culture transformation in 2021, resulting in five core culture behaviors:

Embody people-first servant leadership
Foster customer obsession and innovation
Promote diversity, equality, and inclusion
Measure what matters (OKRs)
Help each other

"We are honored to be recognized for empowering our employees and building a people-focused, diverse culture where the best ideas win. This is directly making a difference in the success we have as a company," said Kash Shaikh, President and CEO of Virtana. "We treat the culture, diversity, and inclusion equally as important as preventing customer churn and increasing recurring revenue for our software. We're committed to innovation and dedicated to our employees and customers. I, along with the entire executive team, will continue to foster a safe environment for women, minorities, and all employees, so we can do our best work and continue to lead Virtana forward."

These two Comparably awards come on the heels of Virtana being presented a Stevie® Award for IT Executive of the Year and the National Diversity Council naming Kash an Authentic Leader of 2021. Earlier this year, Virtana was included as a part of Gartner's Market Guide, Forrester's Now Tech Q2 Report and CRN's Partner Program Guide. Virtana also recently released new independent research: The State of Multi-Cloud Management 2022 report which found that 82% of organizations are currently leveraging a multi-cloud strategy and 78% of organizations have workloads deployed in more than three public clouds.

To view the complete list of Comparably Award winners, visit comparably.com/awards/winners

To learn more about Virtana's mission, core culture behaviors, and career opportunities, visit virtana.com/company/careers/

About Virtana

Virtana provides a unified multi-cloud management platform to simplify the optimization, migration, and monitoring of application workloads across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. The cloud-agnostic SaaS platform allows enterprises to efficiently plan their cloud migrations and then rightsize workloads across their hybrid cloud infrastructure for performance, capacity, and cost—most customers see 25% cloud cost savings or more within the first 10 days of use. Try Virtana's optimization module for free at virtana.com/optimize-free-tier.

Virtana was named Coolest Cloud Company by CRN, Top Cloud Leader Reducing Public Cloud Costs by Business Insider, Best Company Culture by Comparably, and a Customer First company by Gartner.

For industry insight from Virtana, visit: Twitter | LinkedIn | Virtana #KnowBeforeYouGo

SOURCE Virtana