Aerohive Networks on Monday confirmed it's hired a veteran networking executive to oversee worldwide sales -- a first-time position at the wireless LAN and cloud networking startup and testament to its broadening reach.

Dean Hickman-Smith, most recently senior vice president of worldwide sales at email security specialist Proofpoint, will have the same title at Aerohive starting this month. Hickman-Smith spent four years at Proofpoint, and earlier in his career was vice president, worldwide sales and support at ConSentry Networks, vice president of emerging technology at Juniper Networks and, pre-acquisition by Juniper, NetScreen, and vice president of sales at TopLayer Networks.

Also joining Aerohive is Raphael Gernez, the company's new vice president of operations. Gernez was previously vice president of global sourcing and purchasing at SunPower, vice president of product supply chain at Plastic Logic, and also spent 19 years at Hewlett-Packard, including as general manager of HP Flat Panel TVs.

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David Flynn, Aerohive's CEO, said Aerohive is seeing "explosive demand" and needed to expand its team.

"Both [Dean and Raphael] are the best of the best and have decades of experience in leading technology companies to success. These two will provide us with valuable insight, direction and execution as we continue to build on Aerohive's market leadership," Flynn said in a statement.

Founded in 2006, Aerohive has been a much-buzzed-about startup in the ferociously competitive wireless LAN space. It's won raves for its "cooperative control architecture," a controller-less approach to wireless LAN, and for its cloud-based networking and management offerings. It is also widely rumored to be developing new switching products as part of a unified wired-wireless approach.

The company, which sells 100 percent through the channel, says it has about 5,000 customers and will pass an annualized sales run-rate of $100 million before the end of 2012. Aerohive recently took in a new round of $22.5 million mezzanine equity financing.

Aerohive also is frequently mentioned among the handful of networking, infrastructure, data center and security startups expected to be IPO candidates. Another wireless networking upstart, Ruckus Wireless, filed a prospectus for its planned IPO last week. The wireless LAN space's last major IPO was Meru Networks, which debuted in 2010.

PUBLISHED OCT. 8, 2012