Security Information & Event Management (SIEM) , Security Operations

Securonix Taps Ivanti, BMC, SAP Vet Nayaki Nayyar as New CEO

Nayyar Is Securonix's First Female CEO; Longtime CEO Ends 12-Year Run
Securonix Taps Ivanti, BMC, SAP Vet Nayaki Nayyar as New CEO
Nayaki Nayyar, CEO, Securonix (Image: Securonix)

Securonix has snagged longtime Ivanti, BMC Software and SAP executive Nayaki Nayyar as CEO to strengthen product capabilities and customer experience for the next-gen SIEM vendor. She's the company's first female CEO and one of only a handful in the vendor community.

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The Dallas-area company praised Nayyar for doubling Ivanti's total addressable market during her 30 months as president and chief product officer, where she made bets around cybersecurity, automation, edge and endpoint device management, and service management. She will replace Sachin Nayyar, who has led Securonix since 2010 and who will become executive chairman of the board. He is not related to Nayaki Nayyar.

"Nayaki's track record of innovative corporate leadership and deep subject matter expertise make her the right leader to guide Securonix through its next phase of growth," Sachin Nayyar says in a statement.

CEO Change Follows Major Private Equity Investment

Securonix's CEO switch comes just 10 months after Vista Equity Partners made a $1 billion investment in the SIEM, UEBA and SOAR provider. Vista said its investment was intended to give Securonix the capital and expertise to continue on its growth trajectory while meeting record customer demand. Securonix didn't immediately respond to an Information Security Media Group request for additional comment.

"Nayaki is a seasoned software product leader with distinctive experience building operationally excellent platforms while simultaneously helping customers migrate to a seamless cloud experience," says Vista Senior Managing Director Nadeem Syed. "Her deep product experience, coupled with her stellar track record of scaling businesses and building global teams, make her the ideal leader."

This is the second CEO role Sachin Nayyar has walked away from in recent years. He led identity and access governance vendor Saviynt from 2009 to 2018 and stepped aside in January of that year so that co-founder and then-Chief Operating Officer Amit Saha could take the reins.

Securonix was recognized by Gartner in October as a leader in SIEM for the fourth consecutive year. Gartner rated Securonix's completeness of vision around SIEM as second only to Gurucul. The company now can bring analytics and SIEM capabilities to customer data regardless of where it's stored without forcing customers to move or duplicate their data, Chief Strategy Officer Nitin Agale said (see: Microsoft, IBM, Splunk Dominate SIEM Gartner Magic Quadrant).

"Securonix has achieved excellence across multiple domains, including product innovation in next-gen SIEM, UEBA and SOAR, threat detection/hunting, data science and operations, and is now poised to scale its operations and reach," Nayaki Nayyar says in a statement.

Shattering the Glass Ceiling

Prior to joining Ivanti in May 2020, Nayaki Nayyar spent nearly four years leading the digital service and operations management division at BMC Software, where she focused on moving the company into the cognitive and autonomous enterprise era by converging IT service management and IT operations management on the company's Helix platform.

Before that, Nayyar spent nearly six years at German software giant SAP, during which time she oversaw everything from internet of things, machine learning and artificial intelligence to cloud, CRM and mobile applications, and corporate cloud strategy development and M&A. Nayyar's oversight at SAP spanned from product management and engineering to go-to-market and revenue targets.

Nayyar's appointment makes her one of seven female CEOs of a major cybersecurity vendor. Eva Chen co-founded Trend Micro in 1988 and became CEO of the endpoint security vendor in 2005, a position she continues to hold today. British cybersecurity AI vendor Darktrace has been led by either Nicole Eagan, Poppy Gustafsson or both women in co-CEO roles since September 2014.

Application security vendor Veracode promoted longtime strategy and marketing executive Sam King to the CEO role in January 2019 when Thoma Bravo spun the business unit out of CA Technologies after CA's acquisition by Broadcom. Kate Bolseth was in July 2019 promoted from chief operating officer to CEO of Fortra - formerly HelpSystems - and has spearheaded 10 security acquisitions since early 2021.

Then, in January 2020, data security vendor Imperva named longtime Infor COO Pam Murphy as its next chief executive. Most recently, in April 2022, privileged access management vendor BeyondTrust promoted Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer Janine Seebeck to the CEO position.


About the Author

Michael Novinson

Michael Novinson

Managing Editor, Business, ISMG

Novinson is responsible for covering the vendor and technology landscape. Prior to joining ISMG, he spent four and a half years covering all the major cybersecurity vendors at CRN, with a focus on their programs and offerings for IT service providers. He was recognized for his breaking news coverage of the August 2019 coordinated ransomware attack against local governments in Texas as well as for his continued reporting around the SolarWinds hack in late 2020 and early 2021.




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