Ardy Sharifnia (Corero)
Cyber security vendor Corero Network Security is making a concerted push into Asia Pacific, appointing former Ixia Australia and New Zealand general manager Ardy Sharifnia as its new vice president in the region.
Listed on the London Stock Exchange (CNS) and partly owned by Juniper Networks, Corero provides solutions designed to protect organisations against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
With a sole technical focus on DDoS protection and a number of unique features, including native availability in Juniper MX Series, Corero thinks of itself as a defender against the “new breed of DDoS attacks”.
As APAC VP for the company, a role he stepped into in November, Sharifnia’s goal is to build Corero’s presence in the local region, where the company has historically had at least some, if not plentiful, adoption among a few select partners.
“Corero has not had a presence out here previously,” Sharifnia told ARN. “My job is to take it to the next stage; and this is something I’ve done several times now.”
Indeed, in late 2016 Sharifnia was tasked with leading, growing, and driving the success of Ixia, an IT testing, visibility and security solutions provider, across the A/NZ region.
Before heading up Ixia in A/NZ, a role he held for just over a year, Sharifnia was a senior sales director in APAC and Japan (APJ) for Netscout. Prior to Netscout, Sharifnia also did time with Radware, Trend Micro, NCS Group, Oracle and Infoblox.
It was the Infoblox connection that helped to land Sharifnia the Corero job, with a former Infoblox colleague, now at Corero, approaching Sharifnia to see if he wanted to take on the role.
Now, charged with ramping up Corero’s presence in the local market, Sharifnia hopes to get the vendor’s name out there in the local market and drum up fresh business.
“One of the biggest problems Corero has is the fact it’s not well known,” he said.
One of the ways Sharifnia hopes to achieve this goal is to tap into Juniper’s sales activity in the local market to help secure leads and projects for Corero — a logical first step, given the company’s existing ties with the networking vendor.
At present, the company doesn’t have an official channel network in APAC, relying instead on individual partner arrangements, but Sharifnia has embraced a 100 per cent channel model and intends to work with a select number of resellers as Corero picks up projects.
“We’re looking for partners with particular experience and clearance levels, with access in territories I want to go for,” he said.
Top industry verticals and target areas include education, government and network operators such as service providers or other traffic carriers.
Certainly, given the high profile DDoS attacks that have been waged against some of the local region’s most prominent public and private sector organisations over the past year, the time is ripe for a vendor such as Corero to make a push into the market.
“Government is very, very important at the moment,” he said.
