Gert Jan Schenk
President of EMEA Gert-Jan Schenk is President of EMEA at McAfee with 20 years of experience in global sales and ...
I’ve just returned home from a fantastic and very enjoyable ski vacation, where I had the rare opportunity to spend some relaxing yet quality time with my family. As the old adage goes, time really does fly, and the holiday came and went in the blink of an eye. This might be the last year I’m considered a better skier than my own kids!
Before the trip, I spent a whole week in Russia and I’m really excited about the potential this market holds for the McAfee business. Our new office in Moscow looks great and is well-connected. We already have a first-class team in place and we’ve made significant headway in terms of certification.
As a country, Russia is a land of opportunity. The people are so entrepreneurial and dynamic. In terms of the security market in the region, there are a number of critical infrastructures in the energy sector that need to be protected and secured. With our top-notch products, deep knowledge and expertise in this domain, McAfee is well-placed to support customers in this market as it already does in other geographies. Speaking of great products, I was very pleased to hear that in the endpoint space, McAfee Deep Defender just scored 100% in a rootkit protection test. Congratulations to the team!
This aside, this week has been a very busy one for the McAfee team. After a short two days at my base in our Amsterdam office, I jetted off again to Santa Clara for a strategy meeting with the Corporate Executive team. Meanwhile, McAfee executives were representing the team both at the RSA Conference in San Francisco and at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. At RSA, Mike Fey, McAfee’s Worldwide CTO gave a compelling keynote on the fundamentals of security. He discussed how information needs to be easily accessed and easily consumed, but it also needs to be up-to-date and real-time. Organisations cannot base security decisions on past historical data, when the bad guys are one step ahead, attacking in the present.
Our vision of an integrated Security Connected platform seems to be supported by the wider security market; we recently announced the acquisition of ValidEdge Sandboxing technology. Beyond the pure acquisition of this technology, our objective is to set the bar for comprehensive malware protection, moving away from signature-based detection to behaviour-based detection, which will address the ever-changing fundamentals of security architecture and help our customers better anticipate real-time attacks. Security needs to be open and interactive. This is the reason why we created the McAfee Security Innovation Alliance (SIA), which has become the security industry’s premier technology partnering programme. It enables us to protect and optimise our customers’ existing investment while reinforcing their security posture at the same time. This week 11 new partners joined the McAfee SIA, which is great to see!
After RSAC and MWC, the coming week will see the start of CEBIT in Hannover. Our DACH team will be onsite on a pretty impressive designer stand with outstanding demos. Next week will also be very busy for the team in Amsterdam; we’ll be running our Executive week at our Executive Briefing Center (EBC) with our co-president Mike DeCesare, Candace Worley SVP andGeneral Manager Endpoint Security, Pat Calhoun, SVP and General Manager Network Security. I’m looking forward to welcoming our C-Level customers there for a unique experience.
Tags: DeepDefender, EBC, Endpoint Security, Executive Briefing Center, McAfee Network Security Platform, Mobile World Congress, rootkit, RSAC, SIA Partners, ValidEdge sandboxing
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