BeyondTrust, SentinelOne Vet Joins Mandiant Channel Leadership Team

Mandiant has added Dee Dee Acquista, previously with BeyondTrust, to its channel leadership team as vice president of channel sales for the Americas.

Mandiant’s Dee Dee Acquista

In this role, Acquista will lead channel sales efforts and strategy in the Americas. She’ll also expand on the Mandiant channel program through a partner-first approach.

Acquista joins the Mandiant channel leadership team on Oct. 12.

Mandiant will help customers transform their existing security teams to be more productive. It’ll do so by equipping them with better tools and managed services.

This week, FireEye changed its corporate name and relaunched as Mandiant.

Driving Channel Strategy

“I’m excited to be a part of this esteemed company as we strive toward a shared mission of driving a channel strategy that benefits the entire channel ecosystem,” Acquista said. “Mandiant’s leading combination of expertise, intelligence and adaptive technology is a force in the industry. And I’m looking forward to helping extend our reach to a greater number of organizations through unique offerings such as expertise on demand.”

Prior to joining Mandiant, Acquista led the transformation of Proofpoint into a channel-first and channel-focused sales organization. Before that, she incorporated channel into SentinelOne’s go-to-market strategy. Most recently, she was BeyondTrust‘s senior vice president of global channels.

Wes Simons is Mandiant’s senior vice president of sales for the Americas. He played an integral role in Acquista’s hiring.

“She’s done exactly what we need to do successfully several times before,” he said. “It’s around designing a better partner program, how do you bundle, how do you price, all the things you need to do to scale she’s seen that work. Dee Dee has really strong relationships with channel influencers and executives that we need to be connected with. Her credibility is unquestioned in the partner community.”

Organizational Changes

Mandiant’s organizational changes should alleviate concerns, not create more challenges, Simons said.

“We want to eliminate channel concerns and any confusion about what consulting work will go through the channel and what will likely go direct,” he said. “We also want to be clear in setting the expectation that our product and SaaS offerings are designed to go through the channel. Our partners want to build a program about what they know will be there and that they can rely on.”

By early 2022, Mandiant will have talked to its partners about what matters to them, what would make them to turn to Mandiant and what would make the company a good partner, Simons said.

“We can expand partner visibility into the front line and threats,” he said. “We want to give partners what we see on the front line almost instantaneously so they can advantage their customers the way we do. APIs, integration points and visibility all through the cloud so you can see what we see.”