“To continue Milestone’s strategic journey and to meet Milestone’s massive growth ambition, I’m pleased to welcome Ilijana to our executive leadership team,” said Thomas Jensen, CEO of Milestone Systems. “Ilijana comes with vast experience as a senior industry professional with a strong background in sales strategy and leadership. I’m confident she will be a great asset to Milestone and will lead the go-to-market organization to the next level.”

Vavan has expertise in commercial sales strategy and has worked in senior sales and management roles as well as technical roles. She joins Milestone from UiPath, where she worked as their regional vice president. At Milestone, she will take a hands-on approach to managing the day-to-day business and will help the company scale its sales operation, achieve business excellence, and strengthen the structure for the channel business, according to the company.

Milestone adds that Vavan has a solid reputation in the security and software industry for surpassing sales goals. “I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to join Milestone. The market is rapidly growing, and video management software is not only being used for security surveillance, but also for many new business applications like regulating smart cities as well as the healthcare industry, among others. I’m looking forward to joining a team that is preparing for the future and to embark on the strategic journey with them,” Vavan said.

In 2021, Virsec announced $100M in Series C funding from a marquee community of industry leaders and company builders. Marlier’s appointment comes following Virsec’s record-breaking 2021 growth:

• 700% growth in worldwide customer base
• 95% growth in new hires in engineering, go-to-market, and customer success
• Expansion into 14 countries, acquiring new customers in the Middle East, North America, Europe, Africa, Australia, and Asia
• Expansion into new vertical markets including healthcare, telecommunications, public sector, and financial services

“In addition to Brian’s excellent leadership, sales, and financial expertise, he is skilled at growing highly-effective revenue teams to deliver best-in-class products and services to his partners and customers, across the world,” said Dave Furneaux, Cofounder, and CEO of Virsec. “With Brian joining the team, Virsec is on an even faster track to change how Fortune 1000 corporations and government agencies protect their software workloads with a deterministic approach to true runtime protection.”

Marlier, former Chief Executive Officer and Cofounder of Focal Point Data Risk has more than 35 years of experience building market-leading companies and sales teams. He sold Focal Point to CDW for an undisclosed amount in 2021. He was previously at Cisco for 21 years, most notably as Senior Vice President of Global Architectures and Global Enterprise Sales.

“Combining its innovative, deterministic approach to protecting software with one of the industry’s best leadership teams, Virsec is on a fast path to disrupting the cybersecurity market. I am excited to work closely with our stellar sales team to accelerate our growth by expanding into new vertical and regional markets, and also work closely with our customers to gather their ongoing feedback and deliver excellent support to successfully protect their organizations,” Marlier said.

Virsec experienced a tremendous year in 2021, which included a 700% growth in customer adoption and an increase in staff to nearly 200 employees around the globe. The company also expanded and onboarded a robust network of partners to 20+ across North America, the Middle East, and Asia.

With more than 60 patents, Virsec is the only cybersecurity company to converge critical workload protection capabilities into a single solution — including application control, system integrity assurance, and advanced memory and exploit prevention to protect the entire attackable surface of the application. This includes host, memory, web layers, and all runtime elements, whether on-premises, in the cloud, a container environment, or on a virtual machine.

“Sleiman is a visionary technologist and ‘turnaround specialist’ who will focus on building Safe Security’s regional presence, go-to-market and channel strategy in the region. Over his illustrious career which spans over 26 years, he has held leadership positions at giants of the tech industry including Cisco, Nortel, Brocade, and most recently Infoblox. As part of its business expansion strategy, Safe Security will significantly ramp up its investments in Europe, Middle East & Africa – regions that the company believes are key to its growth. It plans to hire more than 100 employees in the next 18 months in the region,” the company said in a statement.

Reflecting on his appointment, Cherif said, “Cybersecurity is a global concern. For all of the time, money, and energy spent telling us how to protect ourselves including what to buy to do so, there’s little sense of actual progress when it comes to security. And that’s key because safety is not about how much money we spend on products, analysts, or investments, it is simply about Knowing. Safe Security is uniquely positioned to provide organisations with the knowledge necessary to better secure their organisations. The SAFE platform delivers 360 degrees continuous, dynamic & intelligent quantitative cyber risk management and breaches likelihood prediction by assessing People, IT Infrastructure, Cloud Presence, Saas Deployments, and Third Party Partnerships. It streamlines the knowledge and language needed by all stakeholders, from the boardroom to the frontline security professionals, so accurate decisions and actions can be taken in a timely fashion. I am excited to join Safe Security and honoured by the trust they have in me. I am confident that we will grow exponentially in the next 2-3 years across international markets.”

“Over the course of the last year, cyber security incidents have seen a dramatic increase globally. With the growing sophistication of cyberattacks, cybersecurity through generic red-amber-green heat maps is not enough. Safe Security is at the epicentre of this paradigm shift; they provide an enterprise-wide, objective, unified and real-time cyber risk quantification platform called SAFE. It aggregates automated signals across people, process technology, and even third-party entities that an organisation works with, to dynamically predict the breach likelihood (SAFE Score) & the financial risk of the breach, to an organisation,” the company said.

Saket Modi, Co-founder and CEO, Safe Security said, “With SAFE, we have created a brand new category of products within cybersecurity, and we are pioneering the shift from a project led, reactive risk management approach to one that is proactive, and enables the Board to truly understand cybersecurity in a de-jargonized manner. Our vision is to make the SAFE score the global de-facto standard for measuring and mitigating cyber risks and our expansion to international markets is central to this vision. International markets are extremely strategic for us and I am ecstatic to have Cherif join us to lead our business in the EMEA region. Cherif is a proven business leader and I am confident that he will replicate our global success and make Safe Security the preferred partner for addressing customer’s needs in the region.”