Styra, leader of cloud-native authorization and the creators and maintainers of Open Policy Agent (OPA), recently announced the appointment of industry specialist Mark Pundsack as their new Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately.
Pundsack has an impressive thirty years of experience in the software development industry, with a depth of expertise to match, leading product development teams and pioneering improvements in developer experience. One of Pundsack’s previous stints was at GitLab, where he served as Vice President of Product Strategy. Under his leadership, GitLab went from version control to a complete DevOps platform, which led to a critical 25X revenue growth.
In his most recent role, Pundsack was the Chief Product Officer at Replicated, where he worked with security-conscious software developers and enterprises dealing with highly-regulated cloud-native environments.
“Mark brings a wealth of knowledge in growing product capabilities and the DevOps ecosystem. I’m excited to collaborate with him and confident that together we’ll push boundaries, drive innovation, and reach new milestones,” says Tim Hinrichs, co-founder and CTO of Styra.
“OPA is the de facto standard for policy and Styra is poised to strengthen its position as a market leader in policy as code. I am ready to roll up my sleeves and lead our next evolution,” says Pundsack. He also says that he is “looking forward to working alongside Tim and the welcoming leadership team to advance our mission and provide best-in-class policy as code.”
Pundsack’s appointment at Styra comes at a critical juncture, with the recent release of Styra Load, a new enterprise version of OPA. Pundsack is “honored to join Styra at such an exciting time. The addition of Styra Load allows enterprises to scale their policy management through performance, efficiency, and time-to-market improvements – taking open source OPA to the next level.”
Made available in February 2023, Styra Load is the enterprise solution to policy as code. Styra Load is already offering major performance improvements and native data integrations as well as policy impact analysis prior to deployment for Git, Okta, and Kafka. Pundsack is expected to take the reins of Styra’s go-to-market strategy as it continues to augment its product offerings.
