Trellix Layoffs Hit Longtime Vets, Top Execs Depart as Company's 'In Trouble'

Trellix layoffs are impacting an undisclosed number of employees while at least two high-level executives, including chief revenue officer Adam Philpott, have left the company.

In addition to Philpott, Amol Mathur, senior vice president of product management and marketing, and at least one other top executive have departed. According to their LinkedIn pages, Philpott and Mathur left Trellix last month.

Mathur joined Trellix after many years with Akamai. He’s now Palo Alto Networks’ senior vice president of products for Prisma Cloud.

Palo Alto Networks’ Amol Mathur

Adam Philpott

Displaced employees posted LinkedIn messages about the Trellix layoffs. Patrick McEnany, former director of information security governance and assurance, was among those pink-slipped.

“My official watch has ended today with Trellix after 20-plus years of service,” he said on LinkedIn. “I was impacted in today’s layoffs, after transitioning through six company transformations from Foundstone to McAfee Inc., Intel Security, and back to McAfee LLC, McAfee Enterprise, and finally Musarubra to Trellix. It has been one hell of a crazy ride and chapter in my career. I have made many new friends along this journey and helped mentor, coach and promote dozens of employees to build their own paths in the cybersecurity industry. I look forward to some vacation time, since I am officially a free agent and open to finding a new company to help build my next 20-year chapter with.”

Reorganization Spurs Trellix Layoffs

Greg Vinson, former senior manager of business development, also was among those let go in the Trellix layoffs.

“Like several others today I was caught up in corporate reorganization,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “It’s been a great run with a lot of special managers and co-workers. But today, I’m reminded of all the people that helped me advance my career, took the time to help mentor me, and appreciated all the hard work and dedication that comes with 15 years of service. I look forward to what the next chapter in my life will bring and wish my Trellix family nothing but the best.”

Eric Parizo, managing principal analyst at Omdia, which shares a parent company with Channel Futures (Informa), said “to put it plainly, Trellix is in trouble.” The company was founded last year when Symphony Technology Group combined its newly acquired assets, McAfee Enterprise and FireEye, into a new company.

Omdia’s Eric Parizo

“We’re seeing uneven performance across numerous market segments in enterprise cybersecurity, and extended detection and response (XDR), where Trellix has doubled down, is no exception,” he said. “Omdia’s latest data indicates the global XDR market will reach $2.284 billion in 2027, but that’s down slightly from our previous five-year forecast. We think economic headwinds, plus the ongoing effort vendors are making to position XDR’s niche versus endpoint detection and response (EDR), security information and event management (SIEM), security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR), etc., will continue to pose challenges.”

CEO Wanted ‘Fresh Start’ with Trellix

Specific to Trellix, in a nutshell, it has “simply tried to change too much, too fast,” Parizo said.

“CEO Bryan Palma desired to get a fresh start with the organization, made from the former McAfee and FireEye enterprise units, even banning the use of the words McAfee and FireEye,” he said. “Staff has to refer to the former companies as ‘TrellixM’ and ‘TrellixF.'”

While Trellix’s vision for a unified comprehensive XDR platform is “bold and compelling,” its sheer size – nearly $2 billion in revenue at the time of the merger, according to industry estimates, in addition to approximately 40,000 customers – posed a variety of tactical obstacles, Parizo said.

“The new executive team … wanted to execute on building the new Trellix XDR platform as quickly as possible, but key operational challenges were overlooked, with not enough attention put toward maintaining existing products, customer relationships and ultimately renewal revenue,” he said. “Today, nearly the entire executive team … has turned over in the last 15 months, there is a shortage of institutional knowledge regarding its legacy solutions due to departures and layoffs, and sources tell Omdia that 2023 revenue has been well below the company’s estimates.”