Security Startup Illumio Hires Sales Exec From Ruckus

Four months after popping out of stealth mode, the security startup Illumio is seriously ramping up its sales efforts.

This morning the company named Denis Maynard, a former executive with Ruckus Wireless, as its senior VP for sales.

Illumio spent two years under wraps developing a security technology it calls its Adaptive Security Platform. Basically, it’s software that allows corporate IT managers to create security rules and polices. What’s unique about that, says CEO Andrew Rubin, is that the rules can be crafted in natural language and are relatively easy to set up.

Second, and this is probably the most important bit, Illumio is utterly agnostic to the kind of infrastructure in use: It could be local servers, all-cloud, or, as is more likely, a complicated and constantly shifting mix of both. The system also adapts as the infrastructure changes. First, it maps it out visually, so you can see all the places where data is flowing on the network. Then, you can start building rules to enforce security policies governing how it flows, and those rules can change as the infrastructure changes.

It’s a relatively new approach to security that appears to be resonating, in part, because it takes into account how companies are shifting toward using cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Windows Azure or Google Cloud to augment their own internal hardware.

Rubin says Illumio has 25 customers, including the investment firm Morgan Stanley and the headset maker Plantronics. “Now we want to scale it up, and we want to scale globally,” he said. “After 100 days out of stealth, we’re finding that this is not in any way a constrained market.”

That’s where Maynard, who has built a career selling networking products to companies, comes in. He spent four years running worldwide sales at Ruckus, a supplier of Wi-Fi networking gear to small and medium-sized companies. Earlier, he spent seven years running sales at QLogic, a maker of connectivity products used inside data centers. He started out at Cisco and spent nearly eight years in its sales operation starting in 1993.

Illumio was pretty secretive until last year when the company took the wraps off its plans. It first attracted our attention in 2013 when it hired Alan Cohen, a former Cisco exec and formerly head of marketing at the networking startup Nicira, where he was chief commercial officer. Shortly thereafter it landed a $34 million Series B investment led by General Catalyst Partners. To date, it has raised $42.5 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Formation8.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.