Dive Brief:
- Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds announced its CEO, Sudhakara Ramakrishna, will step down from the role on Sept. 30 and named Cullen Childress, chief product officer and a five-year company veteran, to serve as the interim CEO, according to a Wednesday release. The company expects to appoint a permanent chief executive within weeks.
- The IT management software company’s CFO Tim Karaca, who has served in the post for a little over a year, will also be stepping down. He will be succeeded by Samuel Monti, most recently CFO of WP Engine, a WordPress hosting provider.
- Karaca said in a LinkedIn post that he will be an adviser to the company until the end of this year after his tenure as CFO ends Sept. 1. “I’m leaving with real confidence in SolarWinds with great leaders around Cullen Childress, Samuel Monti and many others,” he said. “The bench is solid, the functions are working together better than ever, everyone is empowered and [the] portfolio is stronger than ever with agentic capabilities.”
Dive Insight:
Karaca was promoted to CFO in June of 2025, shortly after it was taken private by Turn-River Capital in a transaction valued at $4.4 billion.
At the time of his appointment, the company was facing a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit stemming from a major cybersecurity breach in 2020 that alleged the company and its chief information security officer defrauded investors by mischaracterizing its cybersecurity practices.
The case, which highlighted the increasingly high-stakes regulatory and legal environment for C-suite executives when it comes to cybersecurity, was subsequently dismissed last fall. Still, it was viewed by some legal experts as a cautionary tale, with the law firm McDermott Will & Schulte pointing out in a client note at the time that the SEC continues to support the enforcement of cybersecurities rules that apply to investment advisers, broker-dealers and other regulated entitites.
Monti has more than three decades of experience with public and private software companies, including as finance chief of Epicor Software from 2020 to 2023 and customer engagement platform Khoros from 2018 to 2020. He also has a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Miami University and an MBA from Case Western Reserve University.
“Sam is the right partner for this next chapter — he has scaled and transformed complex software businesses, and he brings the energy and operating rigor SolarWinds needs as we take agentic AI to market,” Ramakrishna said in a statement in the release.
