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Cylance Adds Former Akamai, Kofax Executives to Leadership Team

Cylance, which provides artificial intelligence-based threat detection solutions, has named Grant Johnson as its chief marketing officer and Kumud Kalia as its chief information officer.

The company also has promoted Eric Cornelius, its VP of innovation, to serve as its chief product officer, according to a prepared statement.

Johnson is expected to lead Cylance's global marketing strategy and execution, the company said. Prior to joining Cylance, he served as CMO at Kofax, a robotic process automation company, and held senior marketing roles at Pegasystems, Guidance Software, FileNet (which was acquired by IBM in 2006), FrontBridge (which was acquired by Microsoft in 2005) and Symantec.

Kalia now is responsible for the strategy, implementation and management of the infrastructure and applications that support Cylance's business processes and growth, the company noted. He joins Cylance from content delivery network provider Akamai, where he served as the company's CIO, and has over 30 years of experience scaling IT systems for high-growth companies.

Cornelius will drive product development and innovation and continue to lead Cylance's product management and corporate development teams, according to the company. He initially joined Cylance in 2012 as head of critical infrastructure and incident response under the company's services team and was deputy director and chief technical analyst for the Control Systems Security Program at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Cylance Continues to Bolster Its Leadership Team

The appointments of a CMO, CIO and CPO are among several recent moves to bolster Cylance's executive leadership team.

Cylance in January appointed Chris Scanlan as its SVP of North America sales. Scanlan most recently served as SVP of worldwide sales at cybersecurity solutions company Optiv Security.

Furthermore, Cylance in December named Rahul Kashyap as its global chief technology officer. Kashyap previously served as EVP of products at virtualization technology startup Bromium and led worldwide threat research at McAfee Labs.

Cylance: Here's What You Need to Know

Cylance offers CylancePROTECT, a platform that blends machine learning and AI to help organizations identify and address cyber threats. CylancePROTECT quickly detects threats, Cylance stated, and prevents malicious code from executing on a targeted system.

In addition, Cylance applies AI to endpoint protection and endpoint detection and response (EDR), the company indicated. By doing so, Cylance helps organizations stop data breaches, meet regulatory requirements and optimize their security resources.

Cylance recorded 177 percent year-over-year revenue growth and surpassed $100 million in trailing 12-month revenue in 2017, based on generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), according to the company. Meanwhile, Cylance technology has been deployed on over 10 million endpoints and protects hundreds of enterprises worldwide.

Dan Kobialka

Dan Kobialka is senior contributing editor, MSSP Alert and ChannelE2E. He covers IT security, IT service provider business strategies and partner programs. Dan holds a M.A. in Print and Multimedia Journalism from Emerson College and a B.A. in English from Bridgewater State University. In his free time, Dan enjoys jogging, traveling, playing sports, touring breweries and watching football.