Co3 Systems poaches heavy hitters for European push

Olly Carter, Paul Ayres and Chris Neely understood to be on board for incident response vendor's European launch

A trio of former Symantec/PGP executives are uniting to spearhead the European launch of Gartner "cool vendor" Co3 Systems, CRN understands.

According to channel whispers, Paul Ayres, Olly Carter and Chris Neely are all leaving their current employers to helm the incident response management start-up's push into EMEA.

Talking to CRN, CO3 Systems chief executive John Bruce confirmed that Co3 will formerly launch its European operations in February but would not comment on the identity of its prospective personnel.

"I figured we were overdue in setting up operations in Europe and the quality of the individuals we have attracted is very high," Bruce said.

Co3's solution, which is designed to lower the burden for tracking and meeting regulatory obligations while managing a security incident, is fundamentally different from other vendors in the increasingly crowded incident response space, Bruce claimed.

"There is not a single vendor that isn't using incident management in their marketing messaging," he said.

"But we are the only company whose centre of gravity is all about response and, when the alarm goes off, what on earth do you do. We steer our users to get to the other side of it quickly and efficiently."

Massachusetts-based Co3, whose CTO is US cryptographer and author Bruce Schneier, was crowned a "Cool Vendor" by Gartner last year. About a third of its 100 or so US customers were won through partners, Bruce said.

"I intend to put all the business in Europe through the channel," he added.

"The channel will love this product. The biggest order we've closed is for $650,000 (£428,000) and in the majority of cases they're over $100,000. And it takes us half an hour to train a salesforce."

Ayres, Carter and Neely were all part of PGP's management at the time and shortly after the encryption vendor was acquired by Symantec. CRN understands all three have handed in their notices at their current employers - Vormetric, Centrify and Venafi, respectively.