SentinelOne's new EMEA boss has 'laser-sharp' focus on UK market
Newly-appointed boss Daniel Kollberg opens up about hiring ‘dozens’ of staff across Europe as part of expansion strategy
SentinelOne's recent $120m investment will be used to grow its presence in certain European markets, including the UK, according to its EMEA boss Daniel Kollberg.
Speaking to CRN's sister publication Channel Partner Insight, Daniel Kollberg - who was drafted into SentinelOne last month - said that the funding pot will go towards increasing its presence in Europe, claiming that SentinelOne is very serious about ramping up its business in the region.
The regional VP said his strategy for EMEA will be signed off in the next few weeks following various meetings with SentinelOne's senior management. It will involve hiring "dozens" of staff across EMEA in 2020, with a "laser-sharp" focus on the UK, Germany and France.
He said many of SentinelOne's functions, such as sales execution and customer support, are currently based in the US or Tel Aviv. But under his 2020 plan, these functions will be expanded into the European market.
"There is a large portion of headcount going into this," he said.
"We are expanding functions like customer support, we are going to build further on customer success organisations and we're putting many more people into mainland Europe to support our customers.
"I want to make investments in different go-to-market motions. When I look at how we work in EMEA today, we have been very widespread in our approach to markets; everything from SMB to commercial and mid-market customers to enterprise. I'm going to introduce more of a segmented approach to the market and make sure that we address the largest customers in Europe in a certain way.
"We are going to build more programmatic approaches towards how we approach our commercial and SMB business and make sure that we actually make the right efforts towards continuous winnings in the different segments."
Kollberg claimed he has a track record of scaling up cybersecurity vendors in Europe. His CV includes roles at Palo Alto Networks leading its Northern and Eastern Europe team and then its EMEA Service Providers business. He has also held senior roles at McAfee, FireEye and NTT Security.
He also claimed that SentinelOne is one of the last remaining free-standing end-point security vendors in the market and that one of the vendor's strengths is being an independent company with "no other agenda than to deliver the best end-point security in the world".
Kollberg's comments follow a series of shake-ups in the end-point security space. Symantec was swallowed by semiconductor titan Broadcom last year while start-up rival Cylance disappeared into BlackBerry.
Carbon Black similarly vanished from the market after being snapped up by VMware, while end-point unicorn CrowdStrike went public.
Kollberg said that SentinelOne's independent status will play to its strengths as he looks to scale the cybersecurity vendor across EMEA.
"We are one of the few free-standing non-collective end-point vendors. We are an organisation that has no other agenda than to deliver the best end-point security in the world," he said.
"I think independence is important because it drives focus. It drives the ability for us to be laser-focused on solving one problem, and it gives us the ability to be very, very sharp and focused on execution.
"Joining a company at this stage of maturity, with the muscle of large funding seven months ago is an attractive place to be, not only for me as someone who specialises in growth and scale but also for the partners we are engaged with."