More McAfee leadership changes follow Chris Young's departure

More executives have departed McAfee in recent months amid the departure of former CEO Chris Young, who was replaced by former BMC Software head Peter Leav last month.

More members of McAfee's leadership team have left the company amid the departure of former CEO Chris Young last month, SearchSecurity has learned.

Allison Cerra, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, left the cybersecurity vendor last month, according to a source who requested anonymity. According to Cerra's LinkedIn page, she joined Hewlett Packard Enterprise as vice president of geo-marketing; she had served as vice president of marketing for Hewlett Packard's Americas Enterprise Group from 2014 to 2015 before joining Intel Security Group as vice president of marketing.

Vittorio Viarengo, vice president of marketing for McAfee's cloud business, has assumed Cerra's duties as CMO, the source said. According to Viarengo's LinkedIn page, his current position is "interim CMO" at McAfee.

In addition to Cerra, SearchSecurity learned that John Giamatteo, president and chief revenue officer for McAfee's enterprise business group, has apparently left the company. Giamatteo formerly served as COO of antivirus vendor AVG Technologies and first joined McAfee in 2013 as executive vice president of the consumer business unit.

The biography pages for both Cerra and Giamatteo are no longer available on McAfee's website and both individuals have been removed from McAfee's executive team page.

There was another change with McAfee's leadership team prior to Young's departure as CEO; Tara Long, formerly senior vice president, strategy and corporate development at McAfee, left the company in November. Long is now a senior consultant at Dell.

Other McAfee executives have left the company over the past 12 months. Jeff Hausman, who most recently served as senior vice president of engineering for McAfee's enterprise products, departed the company last March; he is currently vice president and general manager of IT Operations Management at ServiceNow.

Raja Patel, formerly McAfee's vice president and general manager of enterprise security products, also left the company in March. Patel is now vice president of web security products at Akamai Technologies.

McAfee's former CISO Grant Bourzikas, who also served as vice president of McAfee Labs strategy and data science, departed the company in July. He is now CISO of HSBC Bank USA.

McAfee did not respond to request for comment as of press time.

Update: Following the publication of this story, a McAfee spokesperson declined to comment, saying the company does not publicly discuss employee departures.

Since 2016, when McAfee was sold by Intel to private equity firm TPG Capital for $3.1 billion, the endpoint security vendor has undergone substantial changes, including a shift toward cloud security. In 2017, McAfee acquired SkyHigh Networks, a cloud access security broker, to strengthen its cloud offerings. Last August, the vendor acquired NanoSec, a container security startup based in Cupertino, Calif.

Next Steps

McAfee sells off enterprise business for $4 billion

Dig Deeper on Security operations and management