Provar makes software that tests other software. It is the kind of work that never shows up in a product demo and only gets noticed when it fails. In December 2024 the company handed that quiet, high-stakes mission to Tony Sumpster, naming him chief executive and asking him to take a well-regarded Salesforce testing tool and turn it into something bigger.
Sumpster arrived with a resume that reads like a tour of enterprise software's last two decades. He held early executive roles at StorageTek and Perot Systems, then at Moai Technologies, Datawatch, and Tower Software. He rose to senior vice president and general manager of Hewlett Packard Enterprise's largest software business unit, where he ran a $1.2 billion IT Operations Management division and a $450 million IT Service Management business. Those were not greenfield launches. They were turnarounds, the kind of assignments handed to people trusted to steady a business and grow it at the same time.
Then came the CEO chairs. He led Data Intensity, a private-equity-backed managed services provider for hybrid multi-cloud environments. After that he ran Worksoft, the business-process automation company, where he worked with enterprises like PepsiCo, Nike, and Microsoft on de-risking the processes that keep large organizations running. There is a pattern in that history, and it is not subtle: when an automation business needs a steady operator to scale it carefully, Sumpster keeps getting the call.
The handoff at Provar was a delicate one. Sumpster succeeded co-founder Geraint Waters, who did not leave but shifted to a Chief Evangelist role and kept his board seat. Founder-to-outside-CEO transitions can go badly when the new leader tries to erase what came before. Sumpster framed his arrival differently, as building on a foundation rather than replacing it. His public message leaned on continuity: honor what works, then find the next chapter.
That next chapter sits in a busy corner of the software world. Salesforce is enormous, endlessly customizable, and updated several times a year. Every release, every custom workflow, every integration is a chance for something to break in a company's most important system of record. Provar's job is to catch those breaks before customers do - through low-code and pro-code test creation, metadata-aware testing, and automation that stretches across APIs, databases, and user interfaces. It is unglamorous, and it is exactly the kind of problem Sumpster has spent his career around.
LeadershipTeams over plans
Ask people who have worked with him what defines his style and the answer tends to land on two words: strategy and execution. He is described as someone focused on defining strategy and then driving its execution, which sounds obvious until you notice how many leaders are good at only one half of it. His own framing puts weight on the second part - the grind of actually getting a plan done.
The other throughline is teams. Across board rooms and turnarounds he has talked about building teams grounded in diversity, passion, ability, and belief. It is a simple creed, repeated across companies, and it maps neatly onto a career spent inheriting organizations that needed steadying more than they needed reinvention.
There is a small geographic quirk worth noting. Sumpster is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, while Provar is headquartered in London. He runs a British company from California, a transatlantic arrangement that has become ordinary in cloud software but still says something about how distributed modern enterprise businesses have become.
AchievementsTrack record
- Appointed CEO of Provar in December 2024 to accelerate growth and innovation in Salesforce test automation.
- Led Worksoft as CEO, supporting global enterprises including PepsiCo, Nike, and Microsoft.
- As SVP and GM at HPE, oversaw turnarounds of a $1.2B IT Operations Management division and a $450M IT Service Management business.
- Served as CEO of Data Intensity, a private-equity-backed hybrid multi-cloud managed services provider.
- Built roughly 25 years of leadership across corporate, private equity, and venture-backed technology companies.