Sophos Hires Mandiant, FireEye Vet as Global Sales Leader

Sophos has appointed Bill Robbins, formerly with Mandiant, to president of worldwide field operations, charged with overseeing all aspects of global sales with a continued emphasis on channel.

Sophos’ Bill Robbins

The vendor also promoted Joe Levy to president of the Sophos Technology Group (STG). He’s currently CTO and chief product officer, and will retain these titles and the organizational structure of STG.

Robbins will help partners grow their business with sales of Sophos managed detection and response (MDR) and incident response (IR) services and security product solutions. He will also lead customer support, and develop and direct Sophos’ new customer success program.

New Sophos Sales Leader has Long History in the Channel

Before joining Sophos, Robbins was chief revenue officer and executive vice president at Mandiant, and FireEye prior to its divestiture. Before that, Robbins was executive vice president of worldwide sales and corporate marketing at Nuance Communications.

Robbins also held roles at Symantec and Veritas Software, which Symantec acquired. Robbins will join Sophos’ senior management team and report to CEO Kris Hagerman.

“One of the things that attracted me to Sophos is the strong relationship we have with the channel,” Robbins said. “Sophos has grown to a $1 billion-plus cybersecurity solutions provider with the help of a strong and dedicated set of channel partners. I fully intend to maintain and strengthen this relationship. Any updates will be made over time, in consultation with our partner community and only to improve our strategic business programs with partners and, most importantly, security for our collective customers.”

Immediate Priority

Robbins’ immediate priority is to get to know the Sophos team and as many partners as possible by spending time with them in front of customers and prospects.

“I’ve had the good fortune in my career to lead large and complex organizations that serve customers of all sizes around the world,” he said. “In particular, I know the security market extremely well and have learned what works and what doesn’t in building and scaling high-performing, customer-centric go-to-market (GTM) organizations. I am confident that this experience will benefit both our customers and our partners as Sophos continues to grow its market share and as we expand our market presence.”

Robbins said Sophos partners can expect communication, consistency and respect.

“We want our partner community to always know they are indeed our partners and that we want them aligned with us in our mission to provide our collective customers with the mission-critical security that they need and deserve,” he said.

Levy will Continue Expanding Sophos

Sophos’ Joe Levy

As STG president, Levy will continue expanding Sophos as a global cybersecurity as a service provider. Its more than $1 billion product portfolio spans endpoint, network, email and cloud security.

Sophos MDR supports more than 15,500 customers. STG also includes Sophos X-Ops, a cross-operational threat and cybersecurity intelligence team.

Levy will continue to report to Hagerman.

“Joe and his team continue to set new standards for both the pace and the quality of innovation as our technology teams deliver world-class protection, detection and response for our customers, and provide a strong technical foundation to support Sophos’ long-term success,” Hagerman said. “Our product strategy, our technology delivery execution and our future technology roadmaps have never been stronger as a result of Joe’s ambition, vision and guidance as a leader at Sophos.”