AJ Jennings

AJ Jennings is the President & COO of Approyo, Inc., a leading provider of unified IT managed services, cloud-managed hosting, AIOPS, and software licensing for the SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle ecosystems. Formerly, Mr. Jennings served as SVP of Corporate Development at Tegile, a revolutionary metadata acceleration and solid-state storage company focused on all-flash storage infrastructure and predictive analytics for the enterprise IT environment. Mr. Jennings led Tegile through multiple late-stage funding rounds totaling $127M from Meritech Capital, August Capital, SanDisk Ventures, and Western Digital Capital. Mr. Jennings culminated his time at Tegile by architecting and executing its acquisition by Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC). Previously, Mr. Jennings served as Chief Operating Officer and SVP of Corporate Development at Whiptail Technologies, a cutting-edge solid-state storage company. As a founding executive team member, Mr. Jennings's strategic vision and capital expertise were instrumental in raising over $41M from Spring Mountain Capital, RRE Ventures, Ignition Partners, SanDisk, and Cisco. His strategic decisions and leadership led the business to grow from startup to over $40M in revenue, culminating in the successful sale of Whiptail to Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) for $415M. He then served as CTO & Sr. Director of Strategy in the Compute Systems Product Group at Cisco. Before this, Mr. Jennings held multiple roles at Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS), a cloud computing and virtualization technology company that provides server, application, and desktop virtualization software-as-a-service. Culminating his tenure at Citrix as the Global Vice President of Business Development, Mr. Jennings was instrumental in forging strategic relationships with HP, Dell, IBM, Fujitsu, and others whose partner revenues paved the way for Citrix's ultimate $16.5B acquisition and merger with Tibco (NASDAQ: TIBX) Previously, Mr. Jennings served as Senior Director of Strategic Development at Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD), an IT technology company specializing in Fibre Channel storage networking products. Mr. Jennings managed Brocade's overall partner ecosystem and strategic investments. He was central to its five years of 100% year-on-year growth, which drove its eventual $5.5B acquisition by Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO). Mr. Jennings, a true entrepreneur at heart, has founded or co-founded multiple startups in the IT services and cyber security markets culminating in multiple successful exits. His entrepreneurial drive and innovative thinking have led him to hold various management and C-suite executive positions at numerous organizations. Currently, he brings his experience and entrepreneurial spirit to the boards of ShieldIO and Accelerain.