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Cylance restarts local channel charge with new hire

Jason Duerden joins following period of turmoil in the company

Cyber security vendor, Cylance, is attempting to restart its local channel push following a period of turmoil at the company, with the appointment of a new partner executive for Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ).

The company has charged Jason Duerden with running its local channel strategy, following a number of key executive departures in A/NZ. 

As revealed by ARN in April 2017, the company’s director of sales engineering, Greg Singh, and head of channels, Lani Edwards, both exited the vendor.

Further, ARN can now confirm that the company’s APAC chief, Andy Solterbeck, has also left the vendor and moved to KPMG. In addition, Cylance has parted ways with Hue Oh, its APAC marketing manager, who has moved to a new role at former Dell subsidiary, SonicWall.

Solterbeck, Sing, and Oh formed the original APAC team set up by the vendor, with Edwards joining soon after. Now the original team is gone and the company must work to rebuild its local business in the wake of a global staff shakeup.

“As we enter a new phase in our global expansion, we have made some changes in executive leadership in key markets, including Australia/New Zealand and Asia Pacific,” a spokesperson for Cylance told ARN at the time.

“We’ve brought in John Giacomini to head up our global sales effort and our director of International Business Operations Daniel Bernard will lead the expansion of Cylance go-to-market operations in Asia Pacific and Australia/New Zealand.”

Yet both Giacomini and Bernard are based in San Francisco, with sources close to ARN suggesting that three on the ground staff now remain locally, spanning regional sales management roles specifically, alongside an engineering position focused on enterprise security.

The source confirmed to ARN that the three remaining staff members are Rick Ferguson, Anthony Farr and Vlado Vajdic.

Duerden joins the local team form reseller, Aquion where he was enterprise business development manager for A/NZ. Aquion is a Cylance partner.

He joined the company in April 2015 as an inside sales representative and was promoted to the role of corporate business development manager within five months.

The vendor may have seen Duerden’s experience reselling the product as a benefit to the company, but the recent negative press the company has received will be his biggest hurdle in the new role.

“Like every company, as we reach our annual planning cycle we assess our needs and critical growth areas for the coming year and we make some changes in the organisation to realign our team and operations,” a company spokesperson told ARN in April.

“The changes that were made were very modest and we remain about 800 full-time employees who are already executing on next fiscal year’s plans to bring Cylance fully into the next stage of maturity as a late-stage start-up.”