McAfee EVP, Chief Product Officer Ash Kulkarni To Resign Post

Shishir Singh will take over Jan. 1 as interim McAfee chief product officer from Ash Kulkarni, who has led product strategy and execution in the company’s enterprise business group since October 2018.

Ash Kulkarni will resign his leadership post at McAfee after spearheading product strategy and execution in the company’s enterprise business group for more than two years.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based platform security vendor said Kulkarni notified McAfee Wednesday of his decision to resign from the company effective Jan. 1, with McAfee disclosing Kulkarni’s resignation after the market closed Friday. Kulkarni will be replaced on an interim basis by Shishir Singh, who currently oversees the company’s web protection, data protection, CASB and network security products.

Singh joined the organization in October 2014 and was tasked with running the company’s network security business unit for nearly three years until assuming responsibility for the company’s unified cloud security solutions in April 2017. His current title at McAfee is senior vice president of engineering.

[Related: 10 Things You Need To Know About New McAfee CEO Peter Leav]

Former McAfee CEO Chris Young lured Kulkarni to the company in October 2018 from Akamai, where Kulkarni spent more than three years supervising the web performance and web security practices. Kulkarni has been one of just five named executive officers (NEOs) for the entirety of his time at the company, and commanded total compensation of $4.8 million in 2018 and $5 million in 2019.

“Ash [Kulkarni] has been a valued member of the executive team at McAfee,” the company told CRN in an email. “The company will continue to build on the portfolio of enterprise solutions that have made McAfee the partner of choice for 86% of the Fortune 100. His departure will not impact the channel as it is led separately.”

Young left McAfee on Feb. 3, 2020, and has since joined Microsoft to lead their global business development efforts. He was replaced by former Polycom and BMC Software CEO Peter Leav in one of many executive reshuffles to take place at McAfee this year.

McAfee President and Chief Revenue Officer John Giamatteo left the company on Jan. 10, 2020, after overseeing the enterprise business group’s sales, marketing and customer success organizations for 18 months. Some of Giamatteo’s responsibilities were assumed by Lynne Doherty, the ex-head of Cisco’s U.S. Commercial Sales team hired in May to run enterprise sales, pre-sales, channel and marketing.

Kulkarni and Doherty worked alongside one another for the past eight months to jointly run McAfee’s $1.33 billion enterprise business group, with Kulkarni spearheading product research and development and Doherty tasked with driving the go-to-market motion. In the first nine months of 2020, McAfee’s enterprise revenue was $997 million, identical to the sales figure for the first three quarters of 2019.

In addition, McAfee EVP and Chief Financial Officer Michael Berry left the company on March, 10, 2020, and took the same role at NetApp. Berry was replaced on Sept. 2 by Venkat Bhamidipati, who had previously spent more than three years as CFO of Providence St. Joseph Health.

The only top executive to start both 2020 and 2021 at McAfee is Terry Hicks, who has led the company’s $1.3 billion consumer business group since November 2018. Hicks previously spent two years at Infusionsoft, and filled in the vacancy created by Giamatteo’s mid-2018 move from running the consumer group to overseeing go-to-market for the enterprise business group.

McAfee raised $740 million in an Oct. 22, 2020 initial public offering that valued the company at $9.5 billion. The company’s stock is currently trading at $15.48 per share, with McAfee’s market cap tumbling to $6.57 billion.

In its first earnings release as a publicly traded company, McAfee disclosed sales for the quarter ended Sept. 26, 2020, had increased 10 percent to $728 million. The company broke even from a profitability perspective, which was improved from a net loss of $9 million in the quarter ended Sept. 28, 2019.