Gert Jan Schenk
President of EMEA Gert-Jan Schenk is President of EMEA at McAfee with 20 years of experience in global sales and ...
Q2 is a very busy quarter and I hardly believe we have only one month left. My agenda has been and still is busy. I’ve spend a lot of time traveling. I went to Malaga to kick off our pre-sales summit and hold my EMEA Management Team meeting. I can tell you the SE Summit was a great event. We brought together all our EMEA presales community for a week to make them discover our new strategy, the coming roadmaps and of course get them familiar with our the technologies of our portfolio, such as Next Generation Network Security , Information Security, Security Risk Management including Situational Information & Event Management (SIEM) and last but not least our DeepSAFE technology co-developed with Intel. Some of our corporate executives joined us. We had a joyful award evening. Overall, I was impressed by the deep knowledge, the commitment and quality of our presales team. But even more impressive was the true camaraderie, fellowship and positive energy that one could feel in the audience. During my management meeting, I was very pleased to see the latest results of our employee perception survey. Improvements were tangible. I put people at the center of our business development strategy in EMEA. Though we have top notch products and technology, it’s because we have the best people that we can aim to reach excellence.
After having caught up with all my pending mails, I flew with our top performers and our respective families to McAfee President Club in Hawaii. Though it was a long flight from Europe, it was worth it : beautiful sceneries, fantastic service and a privileged moments to share with our best achievers in an informal and relaxed atmosphere; in fact it was a good mix of business and pleasure.
As a business man, I am excited to have started the 2013 planning. I traveled to Cork, Paris and Rome to do business reviews with our local teams. Despite economic challenging times, IT security remains a growing market. Cyber attacks and threats have increased drastically as shows the new Q1 Threat report released by our McAfee Labs.
We continue hiring and growing our activities. I am happy to welcome Pavel Eyges who is our new country manager to run our operations for Russia/CIS, an important market to us. Moreover in the emerging market theatre, we had some really exciting new deals coming in and we also see some great projects in the pipe. No doubt, the Middle East is doing well. It’s a new frontier with extremely curious, innovation driven people. It’s exciting to share that dynamism.
Our SIEM solution is encountering big interest all over the region but especially in the Middle East. People are very open and innovative. They don’t have to cope with too much legacy and at the same they enjoy the freedom to look for the best solution. And who would not be interested in a solution enabling you to save huge amounts of time to get reports. Companies need to improve their security posture while delivering a better ROI. And this is what McAfee SIEM is about. Gartner latest report about SIEM positioned our McAfee solution on the top left of their McAfee EBC in Amsterdam is doing very well with a lot of customers and partners who come to visit us.
My next moves will be to Turkey where I will be presenting at a CIO Summit. I will use the opportunity to be in Istanbul to meet with some of our customers and business media. And last but not least, as Partners represents on of the corners of our EMEA Golden triangle, I am very excited about our next EMEA Partner Summit on June 12&13th in Marbella. We will have more than hundred partners attending the event. I am looking forward to it.
Tags: Cybercrime, DeepSAFE, Information Security, McAfee, next generation data center
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