Evolven | Leadership - Meet Our Experienced Team and Discover Our Strategies
Discover Evolven's leadership team and strategies for success. Meet our experienced leaders who bring years of expertise in driving innovation and transformation. Learn about our unique approach to leadership and how it can benefit your organization.
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Sasha Gilenson - Chief Executive Officer, co-founder

Gad Cohen - Chief Operating Officer, co-founder

Eyal Oz - Vice President, R&D, co-founder

Boštjan Kaluža, PhD - Chief Data Scientist

Kristi Perdue - Vice President of Marketing

Jason Huber - Senior Director of Sales Engineering

Jim Bowering - Director of Customer Success

Sasha Gilenson is Founder and CEO of Evolven Software and is paving the way as an expert leader in IT Operations Analytics (ITOA), addressing the 15-year chronic change and configuration challenges that have undermined performance and availability in IT operations.

Prior to founding Evolven in 2007, Sasha spent 13 years with Mercury Interactive (acquired by HP), managing the QA organization and participating in establishing Mercury Interactive's Software as a Service (SaaS). Sasha played a key role in the development of Mercury Interactive's worldwide Business Technology Optimization (BTO) strategy and drove field operations of the Wireless Business Unit, all while taking on the duties as the Mercury Interactive's top "guru" in quality processes and IT practices domain.

In this capacity, Sasha advised numerous Fortune 500 companies on technology and process optimization, and in turn, acquired a comprehensive and rare knowledge of the market and industry practices. Sasha saw how many enterprises were frustrated with critical business systems going down or underperforming, repeatedly seeing how complexity and gaps in IT operations created problems that no technology filled. Looking at these issues from a new perspective, he envisioned a revolutionary approach for handling the overwhelming and dynamic data that IT teams confront in maintaining performance and availability of their business operations. Sasha founded Evolven to apply a new analytics approach to resolve these chronic change & configuration challenges and dramatically minimize the risk of downtime and slash incident investigation time. Evolven's IT Operations Analytics provides intelligent answers to key IT operations challenges: how to accelerate incident resolution, avoid harmful and risky changes, and assess and optimize IT operations performance.

The innovative solution developed at Evolven has been praised and recognized by leading industry analysts:

EMA senior analysts, Dennis Drogseth and Charlie Betz, reported on Evolven as the "Most adaptive change management analytics."

Forrester's Vice President and Principal Analyst, Jean-Pierre Garbani recognized Evolven as an "Effective solution that provides immediate results."

Roy Illsley, Vice President at Ovum declared that Evolven "transforms change and configuration management."

Sasha was named a Finalist in the 2011 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® New Jersey Award.

Sasha's insights and observations have appeared in leading industry resources:

Blended Analytics: The Secret Sauce of ITOA, Inside Big Data

Smashing the Silos with Blended Analytics, CM Crossroads

Blended Analytics: That's What's Next for IT Mgmt,Information Management

Breaking The Limitations Of Silos With Blended Analytics, Business Computing World

Sasha holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Latvian University and MBA from London Business School.

Gad leads Marketing, Business Development and Product Startegy for Evolven. Gad has over 16 years of marketing and business development experience at high technology companies. Prior to joining Evolven, Gad provided strategic marketing services to start-up companies. Gad co-founded and served as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Prolify, a start-up company that delivers a dynamic process management solution, and he co-founded and served as President of Growth Wizards, Ltd., an international business development company. His previous experience includes executive business development and marketing positions at Business Layers (acquired by Netegrity Inc.), and Tesnet Group (IPO Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange).

Gad holds a Master's degree in Technology Management from New York's Polytechnic University and a Law degree from Bar Ilan University.

Bringing many years of software development and management experience to Evolven's recognized team of industry experts, Eyal has demonstrated management success across various development organizations – from startup to global enterprises. With a focus on execution and customer satisfaction, he adds a unique ability to translate customer needs and pains into new software products. Prior to joining Evolven, Eyal spent 12 years in various R&D roles at Mercury Interactive (acquired by Hewlett Packard [NYSE: HPQ] in 2007). Eyal's leadership was integral to the rollout of their leading products, contributing an innovative business-centric approach to managing applications. Eyal brings a deep knowledge in developing software solutions in the areas of change and configuration management, performance and availability monitoring. He holds BA degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel-Aviv University, Israel.

Boštjan Kaluža is the Chief Data Scientist at Evolven. He's also a hardcore researcher who's done a lot of research into artificial intelligence and intelligent systems, machine learning, predictive analytics and anomaly detection. Prior to Evolven, Boštjan served as a senior researcher in the Department of Intelligent Systems at the Jozef Stefan Institute, the leading Slovenian scientific research institution and led research projects involving pattern and anomaly detection, machine learning and predictive analytics.

Focusing on the detection of suspicious behavior and data analysis, Boštjan has published numerous articles in professional journals and delivered conference papers. In 2013, Boštjan published his first book on data science, Instant Weka How-to, exploring how to leverage machine learning using Weka. Boštjan recently published his second book, Practical Machine Learning in Java, for learning how to use Java's machine learning libraries to gain insight from data. Boštjan is also the author and contributor to a number of patents in the areas of anomaly detection and pattern recognition.

Boštjan earned his PhD at Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School in Ljubljana, Slovenia, rigorously defending a doctoral dissertation entitled Detection of Anomalous and Suspicious Behavior Patterns.

With more than 25 years of industry experience in security, data management, governance and compliance, Kristi brings her expertise to Evolven as the VP of Marketing. With a background in both startup and enterprise software, Kristi is focused on Evolven’s go-to-market strategy, the corporate brand, customer engagement, and revenue generation strategies for the company. Kristi has a history of building high functioning marketing teams, most recently as the CMO of Vaporstream and VP of Product Marketing at Viewpointe. She has also held executive positions at HP/Autonomy, CA Technologies, and Hummingbird, in the diverse areas of product marketing, product management, strategic alliances and international development management.

Kristi has advised and consulted with various entrepreneurial technology start-ups to implement successful go-to-market, sales and marketing strategies and holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Central Florida.

Jason leads Evolven's PreSales Go-To-Market team, drawing upon over two decades of experience as both a leader and hands-on contributor in Solutions Engineering. Before joining Evolven, Jason served as an Advisory Sales Engineer at Cisco/AppDynamics and held the role of Director of Solutions Engineering at both DataRobot and Akkio—a pioneering startup in Generative AI. Notably, at Akkio, Jason played a key role in building the pre and post-sales aspects of the GTM team. Rooted in a background as a developer, Jason had also contributed to Tibco's journey by crafting integrations with prominent CRM and EMR solutions. His commitment to understanding and addressing customer needs has been a consistent thread throughout his career, driving his focus on delivering products and services that align with those needs. Jason's professional career reflects a genuine dedication to technical excellence and a hands-on approach to creating solutions that resonate with customers.

Jason earned a Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science from DeVry University, a Masters of Business Administration from Keller Graduate School, and he is working to complete his dissertation for his Ph.D. in Education from North Central University.

Jim currently leads Evolven's Global Customer Success team, having spent nearly two decades both as an individual contributor and leader in the world of Customer Success working to help customers get the utmost value from their software investment. Before joining Evolven, Jim had a long tenure that stretched nearly 15 years with both Compuware and Dynatrace serving anywhere from a Strategic Customer Success Manager that focused on building value and managing customer relationships throughout the United States within some of the largest Fortune 500 companies in the world. During that stretch, Jim also was a leader of many different teams again in the area of Customer Success throughout both North and South America working to ensure our customers were satisfied with all things post sale. Jim and his teams made it a mission to see the proper ROI on the investments of the customers in which both he and his teams supported. In this capacity and currently with Evolven, Jim has been committed to understanding and addressing the different needs of every customer he has been lucky enough to work with by aligning on mutually agreed upon customer goals, building and delivering successful customer plans, and solving complex customer problems. Jim and his team remain dedicated to working vigorously to ensure our customers at Evolven achieve their goals, accomplish perhaps even more than what they originally set out to do, but most of all are highly successful.

Jim earned a Bachelor's of Business Administration in Management and Marketing from Grand Valley State University, and is constantly eager to learn new things. Jim has always believed that in order to grow as a leader and person, ego has to be left at the door and whether working with colleagues or customers it's important to treat every moment as a learning experience.