Venafi, the inventor of and market leader in Enterprise Key and Certificate Management (EKCM) solutions, today announced the appointment of seasoned sales leaders Matt Poulton as UK Sales Director and Chris Neely as UK Senior Sales Engineer. The move reinforces the growing demand for scalable and interoperable management solutions as encryption key and SSL certificate deployments increase. Poulton and Neely both join Venafi from PGP/Symantec.
Calum MacLeod, EMEA Director Venafi, said: “I am delighted to have Matt and Chris on board. Matt has the drive, experience and customer focus to help us achieve the ambitious growth targets we have set for the UK, and Chris adds vital technology expertise which will help us keep in the forefront of key and certificate management technology. We see a great opportunity for Venafi to lead out in this critical segment of the information security space. Both of these talented and energetic individuals will help us build on the success of our established and fast-growing customer and partner base of global 2000 companies, where the UK is a vitally strategic territory.”
Matt Poulton said: “Having an extensive background in encryption sales, I’ve seen first-hand the explosion of encryption deployments as organizations scramble to protect their critical assets, and the accompanying challenges customers now face in managing associated keys and certificates. I don’t think this can be done without the right processes and automated management. Venafi provides the only platform that allows organisations to automate the discovery, monitoring, validation, management and security of the most commonly used encryption assets.”
“What attracted me to Venafi,” Poulton said, “is its agnostic, vendor-neutral approach. Venafi can help any organisation, as a trusted advisor, manage its vital security assets—independent of platform, application, CA, HSM, or encryption type. I value Venafi’s commitment to making its customers successful in this space. I see the mismanagement of encryption key technologies as a ticking time bomb inside many organisations. You only have to look at recent massive data breaches such as Sony and Epsilon to see what can happen when all vital business assets are not encrypted. Industry-leading organisations are planning to deploy more encryption. It is moving from a ‘would-like-to-have’ technology to a ‘must-have’ technology—one that is driven by PCI compliance and improved management processes. Company auditors are now saying at an early stage, ‘What management processes do you have in place to protect your mission-critical, data protection assets like encryption keys? If you do not have automated processes how are you going to manage, even find, the thousands of certificates and keys in your inventory?’ Venafi is at the forefront of this process and I am proud to be on board.”
Poulton brings over ten years of enterprise IT sales experience to Venafi from both a vendor and channel background. For the last four years he was at PGP and subsequently Symantec.
Chris Neely said: “With organisations focusing more on a data-centric approach to information security, they have been forced to rely heavily on encryption for their data security needs. This has led to the inevitable proliferation of encryption throughout the enterprise. After 4 years at PGP spent helping customers protect their data it became apparent that the next challenge facing organisations, after deploying vast amounts of encryption, was to manage all those encryption assets. As the only true vendor to be able to fully manage enterprise keys and certificates in a heterogeneous environment, the move to Venafi was logical.”