Leadership

A leader in growth and change, Kerry Bailey is an industry veteran with over 28 years experience in the information technology services sector. As CEO of eSentire, Kerry is driving the company's market acceleration and its evolution as the industry's leading Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service provider.

His executive experience spans security, managed services, and cloud computing at Fortune 50 and early-stage growth companies. Most recently, Kerry served as SVP, GM of Cloud, and Channel Chief at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). In these roles, he led the growth of private, public, and hybrid clouds and the worldwide indirect channel.

Prior to Hewlett Packard, Kerry held various senior executive roles at Verizon Enterprise including CEO and president of Terremark, a Verizon company, and leader in global managed security services, data center colocation, and cloud. Earlier roles include CEO of Betrusted and Security Assurance Group and various senior executive level positions at Cybertrust and the United States Intelligence Community (IC).

J.Paul Haynes was drawn to eSentire with a vision to create a disruptive cybersecurity company. He successfully partnered with growth capital firms to invest in and scale eSentire to become the world’s largest pure-play Managed Detection and Response (MDR) provider and market leader. J.Paul is a professional engineer with a 25-year entrepreneurial track record of success. His business acumen, in-depth understanding of technology, and strong leadership have made him a respected and reliable voice on the topic of cybersecurity in North America and Europe.

J. Paul holds both a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Engineering from the University of Guelph. He is also a proud alumnus serving on the Industrial Advisory Board for the University of Guelph’s School of Engineering and the Board of Innovation Guelph.

Eldon Sprickerhoff is the original pioneer and inventor of what is now referred to as Managed Detection and Response (MDR). In founding eSentire, he responded to the incipient yet rapidly growing demand for a more proactive approach to preventing and investigating information security breaches. Now with over 20 years of tactical experience, Eldon is acknowledged as a subject matter expert in information security analysis.

Eldon holds a Bachelor of Mathematics, Computer Science degree from the University of Waterloo.

As Chief Administrative Officer, James Yersh leads the finance functions of the business, as well as human resources, and risk/compliance. Over his 20+ year career, James has transformed financial strategies, revenue growth models, and led more than 30 merger and acquisition deals for leading technology and telecommunications companies, including BlackBerry and Cognos Incorporated. While serving as Chief Financial Officer at BlackBerry, James successfully guided the company through a strategic transformation from a hardware to a software company and created the financial models and structures to enable the pivot.

James graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Commerce (Honors Accounting) from the University of Ottawa. He also holds several certifications including Chartered Accountant (ICAO), Certified Information Systems Auditor (ISACA), and Certified Information Systems Security Professional (ISC2).

Dustin Rigg Hillard is responsible for leading product development and technology innovation at eSentire. His vision is rooted in simplifying and accelerating the adoption of machine learning for new use cases.

Prior to eSentire’s acquisition of Versive, he was CTO at Versive, where he focused on automating security expertise and understanding normal network behavior through machine learning. Dustin was also an early data scientist for Microsoft’s Cortana and worked in ad-revenue and relevance at Yahoo! He has deep ML experience in speech recognition, translation, natural language processing, and advertising, and has published over 30 papers in these areas.

Dustin holds a Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington.

Ashley Fidler is responsible for ensuring all the product pieces come together into great experiences for our customers. At eSentire, that means bringing together a cross-disciplinary team of product managers, designers, and writers to deliver cutting-edge enterprise products.

Prior to eSentire’s acquisition of Versive, Ashley led the product organization at Versive and was focused on automating security expertise and understanding normal network behavior through machine learning. She previously also focused on natural language processing, with roles in both data science and product at Microsoft. She worked on language understanding systems, as well as on the underlying machine learning infrastructure for natural language, for Xbox and Cortana.

Ashley holds a Master of Science and Ph.D. from Georgetown University, as well as a Master of Science from the University of Edinburgh and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Colorado.

As Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at eSentire, Chris Gesell drives the company's business, brand, and go-to-market strategies. Chris is a results-focused executive who brings more than 20 years of global leadership experience in IT services, including consulting, cloud, security, data center, and managed services. His experience in corporate strategy and executing mergers and acquisitions, along with setting the company's direction, will be critical to the next phase of eSentire’s growth.

Chris has a passion for IT transformation, distilling complex business challenges into innovative product strategies, and sales enablement. Most recently Chris served as VP of Worldwide Partner Strategy at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and CMO at Terremark, a Verizon company.

As the Executive Vice President of Global Sales at eSentire, Brett leads the company's global sales strategy, execution, and growth. With more than 25 years experience in sales leadership and customer-facing roles, Brett has a successful record leading high-performing global sales organizations, building trusted client relationships, and delivering consistent growth. An accomplished sales leader, he delivers a sales process that provides clients with the information and support they need to make the right decisions for their organizations and its constituents.

Brett has served in executive-level roles at Cybertrust, Verizon Enterprise Services, Focal Point Data Risk, and Digex.

As Grand Poohbah of Data, Art is responsible for the application of machine learning across eSentire's technologies. Art's expertise is in combining machine learning (ML), statistics, large-scale data processing, and domain knowledge to find relevant results. He architected and built the core of the Versive automated ML platform, which was acquired by eSentire.

At Sandia National Laboratories, he researched the reliability of machine learning tools and developed novel algorithms to efficiently learn from massive data on Hadoop.

Art’s dissertation work at Cornell investigated practical modeling problems in the context of ecological modeling — specifically, the domain of modeling continent-wide populations of bird species using citizen science data. This work helped build the tools used in creating the U.S. Department of Interior’s State of the Birds reports. Art has 241 bird species on his life list.

Matthew is responsible for product engineering, delivery, and quality at eSentire. His expertise is in leading high-impact engineering teams to deliver enterprise-scale products.

Prior to eSentire’s acquisition of Versive, Matthew was VP of Engineering at Versive where he built the engineering organization that automated security expertise and the understanding of normal network behavior through machine learning. He has also held engineering leadership roles at Parsable. Here, he led the ground-up development of the company’s industrial collaboration and workflow solution. In a leadership role at Castlight Health, he drove the innovation of the company’s machine-learning healthcare pricing engine and led the application engineering department.

Matthew holds an Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor of Science in Computation and Neural Systems from Caltech.

Chris Braden is a veteran sales and channel executive, bringing over 20 years experience building, leading, and executing successful programs around the world. In his current role as the Vice President, Global Channels and Alliances, he is responsible for eSentire's global channel program, overseeing strategic partner recruitment, international expansion, and growth with current partners through an improved enablement program. He is a 2019 CRN Channel Chief recipient. Chris also oversees strategic partnerships with key partners Carbon Black, Sumologic, and Cyxtera.

For the decade prior to joining eSentire in 2018, he built notable global channel and alliance programs for companies such as Akamai, Exceda, and FocalPoint. Chris holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia and a Masters of Business Administration from George Mason University.

As a seasoned security leader, Sean Blenkhorn has spent much of his nearly 20-year career consulting with global Fortune 50, 100, 500, and 1000 companies in the security and compliance solutions space. In his role as Vice President, Sales Engineering, and Field CTO at eSentire, Sean leads his team globally as they provide guidance, consultation, and technical perspective to new customers.

Sean has an Associate’s Degree in Software Engineering from Georgian College.

As a member of the LegalSec Council with the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA), Mark Sangster is a cybersecurity evangelist who has spent significant time researching and speaking to peripheral factors influencing the way that legal firms integrate cybersecurity into their day-to-day operations. In addition to his passion for cybersecurity, Mark's 20-year sales and marketing career was established with industry giants like Intel Corporation, BlackBerry, and Cisco Systems.

Mark's experience unites a strong technical aptitude and an intuitive understanding of regulatory agencies. During his time at BlackBerry, Mark worked on the first secure devices for government agencies. Since then, he has continued to build mutually beneficial relationships with regulatory agencies in key sectors.

Mark holds a Bachelor in Psychology degree from the University of Western Ontario and a Business Diploma from Humber College.

As the Vice President of Advanced Security Concepts, Jason Kichen leads eSentire’s overall cybersecurity program. He is responsible for ensuring operational cybersecurity expertise is embedded into all product and engineering development, and for unifying efforts across threat intelligence, threat hunting, and SOC operations. Jason brings nearly 15 years experience working in the U.S. intelligence community as an expert in technical and offensive cyber operations. He was responsible for the design and execution of advanced technical operations all over the world. He has extensive experience against hard targets and has interacted with the most senior levels of the United States government.

Jason has two Director of National Intelligence Meritorious Unit Citations and a National Intelligence Professional Award from the National Counterproliferation Center, amongst many other awards and commendations bestowed upon him by the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community and various federal contractors. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in political science and history and Master in Science in telecommunications engineering management.

As Vice President of Security Operations, Rob leads all facets of the company's Security Operations Center (SOC), including managing operational risk and continuity planning. Rob has more than 20 years of IT experience in life and mission-critical service support functions across both the federal government and private sector. With a passion for operations, Rob welcomes hard problems as part of the regular course of business and prefers to lead from lessons learned the hard way. In the words of a past leader, Gen. Rick Hillier: “I learned by pulling on doors marked push.”

As Vice President of Customer Experience, Megan Eckhardt leads eSentire’s customer advocacy organization, which includes Customer Engagement, Technical Solution Specialists and Deployment, Customer Care, Customer Success Management, and Compliance. With 10+ years’ experience in enterprise strategic account management, customer advocacy, and service management, Megan is fiercely committed to ensuring every customer enjoys a seamless and productive end-to-end service experience.

Kathryn is a passionate people leader, keenly focused on organizational collaboration that drives innovative and positive employee programs. With more than 20 years of experience, Kathryn has led global HRBP teams primarily in R&D environments supporting software development, quality, product management, project management, and product marketing. She is tirelessly committed to driving enriched employment experiences.

Kathryn has led corporate-level HR Centres of Excellence focused on Talent Management, Global Learning, HR Communications, and Corporate Citizenship. Kathryn has held senior-level roles with companies including WellPoint Health, BlackBerry, and Nortel.

As Chief Information Security Officer, Peter Romano is responsible for the enterprise security and compliance vision, strategy, and roadmap to ensure eSentire information assets are protected and compliant with various privacy and statutory requirements.

He is a security officer and people leader with expertise in the areas of mobile and cloud computing in high growth technical organizations. Over the course of 20+ years in security, he has overseen the creation of organizational capability that dramatically increased the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of internal IT and cloud service offerings. Peter has held various security leadership roles at BlackBerry, D2L, and TELUS, and has taught Information Security at Conestoga College.

Peter holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Civil Engineering from the University of Waterloo and a Master of Science in Information Security from the University of London at Royal Holloway. He also holds the Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) designation from ISACA.