McAfee Nabs Ex-Cisco Exec To Run Enterprise Sales, Marketing

Lynne Doherty will oversee McAfee’s sales, pre-sales, channel and marketing efforts in the enterprise business, and will count new global channel chief Kathleen Curry among her direct reports.

McAfee has hired the head of Cisco’s massive U.S. Commercial Sales organization to lead global sales and marketing efforts for the platform security giant’s Enterprise business.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor has tasked Lynne Doherty (pictured above) with running all sales, pre-sales, channel and marketing groups that support McAfee’s enterprise business, and will count new global channel chief Kathleen Curry among her direct reports. Doherty started at McAfee Monday, and will report directly to CEO Peter Leav, who joined McAfee in January after leading BMC Software and Polycom.

Doherty will take over some of the responsibilities previously held by John Giamatteo, who became McAfee’s president and chief revenue officer in July 2018 and oversaw the company’s sales, marketing and customer success organizations. Giamatteo’s biography page and listing on the McAfee executive team website were taken down in early 2020 around the time Leav started as McAfee’s CEO.

[Related: McAfee Snags Ex-Apple Sales Exec To Be Global Channel Chief]

Doherty wasn’t available for additional comment, and McAfee didn’t immediately respond to questions about how Doherty’s role at the company compares to Giamatteo’s. Doherty will work alongside Ash Kulkarni, who has been responsible for product strategy and execution in McAfee’s enterprise business group since October 2018. Kulkarni joined McAfee after three years at Akamai.

McAfee’s $1.5 billion consumer business, meanwhile, has been led by Terry Hicks since November 2018. Prior to Hicks’ arrival at McAfee from Infusionsoft, Giamatteo spent four-and-a-year years leading the company’s global consumer business.

McAfee said Doherty’s immediate focus will be ensuring McAfee’s Enterprise team continues to deliver a premium experience and strong security outcomes to customers as the business landscape changes due to the coronavirus pandemic. With cloud and security highlighted as key areas for crisis response spending, McAfee said Doherty will focus on supporting the evolving needs of firms around the world.

Doherty spent nearly 15 years at San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant Cisco, rising up the ranks to become senior vice president of U.S. Commercial Sales in August 2018. In that role, Doherty oversaw a team of more than 2,000 employees and was responsible for driving $8 billion in revenue annually though the sale of products and services to more than 400,000 accounts.

Prior to that, Doherty spent nearly two years leading Cisco’s Security Sales for the Americas, overseeing a $2 billion portfolio of products across the United States, Canada and Latin America. Doherty played a key role in the integration and strategy efforts following Cisco’s $2.35 billion acquisition of Duo Security, $635 million acquisition of OpenDNS (now Umbrella), and $293 million acquisition of CloudLock.

Doherty spent her first 11 years at Cisco as an area vice president, operations director and regional sales manager in the company’s U.S. Commercial Sales organization, according to LinkedIn. Prior to joining Cisco, Doherty spent one-and-a-half years as director of sales at Blackbaud and nearly six years in sales and engineering management roles at Sun Microsystems.

McAfee faces an uncertain ownership future, with reports swirling for more than a year that TPG Capital was looking to cede its ownership stake. The Wall Street Journal reported in January that McAfee was looking at combining its own consumer business with the $2.41 billion pure consumer operation of NortonLifeLock. In that scenario, McAfee’s enterprise operation could end up with a different buyer.