Styra, Inc., the creators and maintainers of Open Policy Agent (OPA) and leader of cloud-native authorization, announced the appointment of Mark Pundsack as Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. Pundsack brings more than thirty years of experience to the role with deep expertise in the software development industry, where he has spent much of his career leading product development teams and forging a path for developer experience. Previously, Pundsack served as Vice President of Product Strategy at GitLab, where his contributions helped take the company from version control to a complete DevOps platform and led to 25X revenue growth during a critical time. Most recently, Pundack served as Chief Product Officer at Replicated, where he worked with security-conscious enterprises and software developers 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.
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“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,” said Pundsack. Pundsack also expressed his enthusiasm for the team, saying 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 joins Styra at an optimal inflection point with the recent release of a new enterprise version of Open Policy Agent, Styra Load. “I’m honored to join Styra at such an exciting time,” says Pundsack. “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.”
Released in February 2023, Styra Load is the enterprise solution to policy as code. Today, Styra Load provides significant performance improvements, native data integrations for Okta, Git, and Kafka; and offers policy impact analysis before deployment. As Styra continues to enrich its product offerings, Pundsack will play a crucial role in leading its go-to-market strategy.
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