BLOG | Oct 1, 2025

Forward Networks Welcomes Sanjay Mehta as CMO to Accelerate Global Growth

Forward Networks is entering its next stage of growth with the appointment of Sanjay Mehta as Chief Marketing Officer. His proven track record in scaling enterprise technology companies comes at a pivotal moment, as organizations worldwide turn to Forward Networks’ digital twin to prepare their networks for the demands of AI.

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Dawn Slusher
Senior Manager, Content Marketing and Analyst Relations

Who should read this post?

CIOs and senior IT leaders responsible for digital transformation strategies
NetOps and SecOps leaders facing AI-driven infrastructure demands
Executives seeking proven solutions for compliance, risk reduction, and resilience

What is covered in this content?

Why Forward Networks is expanding its leadership team with a seasoned CMO
How Sanjay Mehta’s experience will accelerate adoption of digital twin technology
The role of a network digital twin in preparing enterprises for the AI era

Scaling the Digital Twin to Networks Everywhere

Forward Networks has always been about solving the hardest challenges in running and managing critical infrastructure. Since its founding in 2013 by Stanford Ph.D.s, the company has pioneered the world’s first mathematically precise network digital twin—technology now trusted by leading enterprises and government agencies. With AI workloads straining infrastructure in new ways, Forward is entering a pivotal new phase: bringing the power of the digital twin to organizations everywhere.

Sanjay Mehta brings deep experience in helping enterprises adopt transformative infrastructure technologies. At Splunk, he helped build a global enterprise presence and played a key role in taking the company public. Later, as CMO at ThousandEyes, he established the company’s market presence and brand, leading to its acquisition by Cisco. Over the following five years, he continued to drive ThousandEyes’ growth inside Cisco, integrating the business into Cisco’s unified networking and operations strategy while ensuring it remained one of the company’s fastest-growing franchises.

Why the Network Digital Twin Matters Now

Today’s enterprise network is a perfect storm of complexity: hybrid and multi-cloud environments, relentless security threats, and mounting pressure to support AI-driven workloads. These workloads are intolerant of latency and demand massive bandwidth, leaving no margin for error. Legacy tools can’t deliver the verified, always-accurate insight IT leaders need to ensure reliability, maintain security, and confidently adopt new technologies.

The Forward Enterprise network digital twin solves this challenge by creating a mathematically accurate virtual model of the entire production network, every device, configuration, and behavior across multi-vendor environments and all major clouds. This mathematically precise model allows IT teams to eliminate blind spots, validate compliance, and reduce risk. IDC reports that Forward Networks customers realize an average of $14.2M in annual benefits through increased efficiency and security.

A Trusted Foundation for AI-Driven Operations

As AI adoption accelerates, the network is even more important than ever. Agentic Operations offer efficiency gains to IT teams, but organizations cannot risk feeding incomplete or inaccurate data into AI-driven systems. Forward Networks’ digital twin provides the verified foundation that ensures AI tools operate with precision.

Our CEO David Erickson put it succinctly: “As enterprises race to prepare their infrastructure for the AI era, having detailed, always-accurate, and actionable knowledge of the network has become non-negotiable. Forward Networks is the only company delivering this with mathematical precision.”

Mehta echoes this urgency: “Legacy tools weren’t built for the demands of modern operations. Forward Networks’ digital twin redefines what’s possible—giving organizations a mathematically precise foundation to run secure, efficient, and AI-ready networks with confidence.”

Scaling Forward: What’s Next

Forward Networks is building serious momentum, and this milestone is just one sign of what’s ahead. We are expanding our global presence to deliver even greater value to our customers while welcoming new ones into the fold. Growth in our executive leadership and sales teams will accelerate our reach, and our world-class engineering organization remains the foundation of everything we do.

With a strong engineering presence in both North America and India, our experts are available around the clock to ensure customer success. Over the next 12 months, customers can also expect significant product enhancements that will extend the power and impact of the network digital twin. As we scale globally, our mission stays clear: to make the network digital twin an indispensable foundation for enterprise resilience and AI readiness worldwide.

Winner of over 20 industry awards, Forward Enterprise is the best-in-class network modeling software that customers trust

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