New Forescout CEO wants to make partners an offer they can't refuse

26.02.2015
ForeScout has named a new CEO who has big plans for making the company's products the remediation layer of choice for other vendors' security offerings that find problems with endpoints but can't fix them.

Michael DeCesare, 49, who starts March 1, is joining the company from Intel where he was president of its security division, and says he made a carefully calculated decision to join ForeScout, swayed by the quality of its products and potential for growth.

The company's CounterACT appliance performs network access control but can also integrate with a range of third-party security platforms such as SIEMs, vulnerability assessment systems, mobile-device management platforms and advanced threat-detection systems to provide endpoint data to them but also remediate endpoint problems and if necessary isolate compromised devices.

The company has integration alliances with other vendors, among them ArcSight, Damballa, Gigamon, Check Point, FireEye, IBM, Invincia, McAfee, Microsoft, Palo Alto, RSA and Tibco.

He says ForeScout can provide these vendors with information from endpoints and act as a ready-to-go endpoint remediation platform that would take them a long time to develop and mature. "We're not version 1.0," he says.

He calls this integration with other systems ForeScout's untapped jewel to which he hopes to bring more visibility and recognition. The relationships with other vendors are at varying levels of maturity, but DeCesare, who has a sales background, says he hopes to deepen them, bundle CounterACT with the third-party platforms and be more aggressive with sales.

Before coming to ForeScout, DeCesare was co-president of McAfee, which was bought by Intel to become Intel Security. Before that he worked at EMC, Documentum and Oracle.

(www.networkworld.com)

Tim Greene