Patrick Dennis and the art of keeping the line open

Patrick Dennis’s mother wanted him to get a badge. He had been doing dot-com work, including running a business that sold for a modest sum. To him, things were going reasonably well. To his mother, there was still the reassuring matter of a proper employer. He went to EMC. A corporate identity card can seem an unpromising beginning for an entrepreneurial career. In Dennis’s case, it helped open a succession of doors into businesses where something substantial needed to change.

Before that came Kodak by day and Rochester Institute of Technology largely by night. He supported research-and-development systems while studying information technology, with an interest in databases and economics. The machinery was real; so were the demands of fitting an education around work. Years later, the technology executive would describe his job as involving a kind of historical pattern recognition. Companies acquire habits. Markets move. Recognizing the difference between useful continuity and expensive attachment becomes part of the work.

A first corner office, with evidence attached

Dennis became president and CEO of Guidance Software in May 2015. His preparation included more than a decade at EMC, across cloud, services, acquisitions, business strategy and restructuring, as well as sales leadership at Oracle. Those responsibilities put him near several different versions of the same question: what does a customer need, and can the business actually supply it?

Guidance offered an unusually tangible answer. Its EnCase software helped investigators examine digital evidence. The company also sold endpoint security and tools for finding sensitive information. Computers leave traces; someone has to make those traces intelligible. Dennis was running a business concerned with turning the contents of a machine into something people could investigate and act upon.

He also volunteered two interests that sat comfortably outside an executive biography: economics and Formula 1. Both reward attention to the consequences of a decision. Neither offers much sympathy when the arithmetic goes wrong.

In July 2017, OpenText agreed to acquire Guidance for $7.10 a share, an equity valuation of approximately $240 million. The transaction joined Guidance’s forensic and endpoint capabilities to OpenText’s information-management portfolio. Behind that neat announcement lay a longer negotiation. Contact between the businesses stretched back to August 2016, with due diligence and further discussions continuing into the following year. A completed deal arrives with a date and a price; the work that gets it there has considerably more calendar entries.

Trust becomes the recurring subject

After Guidance and leadership of Aspect Software, Dennis took over ExtraHop in February 2022. The assignment returned him to cybersecurity, this time through network detection and response. ExtraHop’s work concerned seeing activity across an organization’s network, including threats that might otherwise escape attention. He described the appeal in terms of a mission and work that mattered to customers’ businesses.

He would work with co-founders Jesse Rothstein and Raja Mukerji, alongside the company’s investors. His brief included international expansion, enterprise growth and cloud security. Dennis also emphasized distribution partners. A business selling complex technology needs people who can get it installed, understood and used. His confidence in that relationship was expressed with less ceremony than the usual partnership announcement: he wanted partners to know they had an ally in the CEO’s office.

His writing at ExtraHop widened the subject from intrusions to trust itself. In a 2023 series called Continuous Compromise, he examined deepfakes, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and the fragility of digital confidence. The subjects shared a practical concern: what happens when systems that people depend upon become harder to believe?

That question followed him to Venafi, which announced his appointment as CEO in January 2024. Venafi specialized in machine identity management, the cryptographic credentials that allow software and devices to establish trust. In October, CyberArk completed its acquisition of the company for approximately $1.54 billion in cash and shares. By then Dennis had moved to Avaya. The chronology matters: he led Venafi during the deal’s development, while completion came after his next CEO job had begun.

“The channel has got a friend at the helm.”

Patrick Dennis, on joining ExtraHop · 2022

The restaurant on the other side of the spreadsheet

There is another business in the picture: Point Easy, in Denver’s Whittier neighborhood. Dennis partnered in opening the restaurant, giving a technology career an outlet with rather different operating hours. His connection to Colorado extends beyond a mailing address. He has spoken about mentoring the next generation and wanting the state’s cybersecurity talent base to grow.

Point Easy also supplies a useful corrective to the assumption that an executive’s interests must all resemble his day job. Restaurant partnerships require capital and judgment, but the result is a room people can enter. The experience is immediate. A guest has little reason to admire your operating model if dinner is disappointing.

His public enthusiasm for the place is specific. Promoting a New Year’s Eve service, he listed dishes, discussed additions to the wine selection and stressed that diners could book normally. That is a more revealing detail than a declaration of passion. He was interested in what people would eat, drink and enjoy. Somewhere between enterprise software and a restaurant reservation, the customer remained recognizably human.

Returning to a company he already knew

Avaya appointed Dennis CEO effective September 1, 2024. He had already been its board chair since May 2023, when the company emerged from recapitalization. Alan Masarek, the outgoing chief executive, had worked with him on strategy. Dennis therefore arrived with knowledge of the company’s plans and relationships, rather than an introduction to them.

His background at Aspect gave the appointment another connection to customer-experience software. Avaya’s task was familiar in outline and demanding in practice: help large organizations adopt new technology while continuing to run the systems on which their operations depended. Customers with complicated communications environments do not get to pause their working day for a vendor’s reinvention.

At GITEX in Dubai in October 2024, Dennis pressed for AI to demonstrate concrete value and returns. The event’s demonstrations connected voice, chat, email and other channels, with automation assisting people through customer interactions. It was a commercial test expressed in ordinary terms. A technology fashionable enough to fill a conference still has to earn its place in somebody’s budget.

Making the next conversation remember the last

Avaya introduced Infinity on April 22, 2025. Dennis’s explanation began with a recognizable frustration: investments intended to improve customer interactions can leave those interactions scattered across systems. Each additional channel creates another opportunity for context to disappear.

“Strong bonds are earned over time, interaction by interaction,” he said. Infinity’s proposition was to bring channels, information, applications and workflows together, with AI incorporated into existing enterprise environments. The architecture allowed private, on-premises and hybrid deployments. The commercial promise depended on extending what customers already owned while opening a route to new capabilities.

In July, Avaya announced plans to add Model Context Protocol support and a partnership with Databricks. MCP provides a standard way for AI models to work with external tools and information. Databricks brought data governance and security into the proposal. The announcement targeted MCP availability for the fourth quarter of 2025.

For Dennis, this connected two parts of his career. AI needs access to useful information to perform useful work. Enterprises also need control over that access. The security concern and the customer-service ambition meet at the same doorway. A fluent conversation is of limited comfort if nobody can explain which systems the software has permission to enter.

The software enthusiast doing the financing

In a conversation about Avaya’s progress through 2025, Dennis described his goal as making the company durable. He acknowledged that people hearing him discuss finance might imagine a private-equity executive primarily occupied with numbers. He would happily spend his time with the software team, he explained. The responsibilities of the business required attention elsewhere.

He also singled out the organization’s handling of change, giving employees credit for absorbing a substantial amount of it while retaining the company’s heritage. That is an aspiration with a built-in tension. Speed requires decisions; continuity requires judgment about what those decisions might damage.

His January 2026 appearance on Next Exit addressed that operating problem through focus, sequencing, pricing and forecasting. The discussion concerned the relatively small number of choices that create value, including early decisions that a new CEO can make with confidence. It offered a view of executive work as selection: deciding where attention belongs when every initiative arrives with a persuasive explanation of its importance.

A line that has to stay open

Avaya announced Nexus on March 18, 2026, targeting availability in the fourth quarter. Its proposed role was communications infrastructure for demanding environments, including government, financial services and public utilities. The emphasis fell on reliability, security and control, with links to radios, notifications and other operational systems.

At Avaya Journeys in Washington the following month, Dennis connected that direction to requests customers had made a year earlier. They had asked the company to remember the importance of high-quality, low-latency voice. Nexus was presented as a response. The sequence is revealing: listen to an operational requirement, then organize a product around it.

On August 3, 2026, Avaya announced Jeff Clarke as CEO and Dennis’s transition to executive chair. The board credited Dennis with advancing customer engagement, launching Infinity and Nexus, and improving financial and operating performance. His responsibilities changed; his relationship with the company continued.

Dennis has said he wants his legacy to give someone else a beginning. That ambition sits comfortably beside his interest in mentoring. It also gives the executive-chair transition a quieter measure than another job title. After decades of changing businesses, there is still the question of what the next people can build with what remains. His mother asked for a badge. The more interesting question became what he would leave behind when he handed it over.