Exabeam this week announced that it closed a $200 million late-stage funding round on a $2.4 billion valuation and hired a new CEO: Michael DeCesare, who previously was president of McAfee, and most recently served as CEO and president of ForeScout Technologies.

DeCesare’s got big plans for the security analytics vendor. “I ultimately believe that our destiny is to be a major player in the larger category called security operations,” he said in an interview with SDxCentral.

The latest funding round, led by the Owl Rock division of Blue Owl Capital and supported by existing investors Acrew Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Norwest Venture Partners, brings Exabeam’s total raised to $390 million over six funding rounds beginning in 2014. And it shows that investors “realize how big Exabeam can be,” DeCesare said.

“We have a chance to be to cyber what ServiceNow is to the services market — the unification, the ability to create a CMDB and sit on top of your service system, your ticketing systems — that’s the real estate we occupy,” he added. “The round tells the marketplace just how well positioned Exabeam is to be a big, successful player, and I saw that same opportunity, which is why I jumped at it.”

DeCesare says Exabeam’s size (about 411 employees) and company culture created by founding CEO Nir Polak, among other factors, attracted him. “Having come off running big McAfee, where we were many thousands of employees, I definitely like the smaller-size company where you can be more nimble,” he said.

Polak, meanwhile, will continue on as an “active member” of the executive team, remain at the company, and assume the role of chairman of the board.

DeCesare sees himself as a “stage two” CEO, brought in to scale the company and expand its use cases as it targets the larger security operations market.

When he looked at the larger market trends, DeCesare said Exabeam occupies a front row seat to capitalize on them. “One of which was this transformation of data,” he said. “All the on-prem systems, the SIEMs, the data lakes that have grown up for 20 years on prem are all moving into Snowflake, and [Amazon Web Services], and [Microsoft] Azure, usually for ROI purposes. And Exabeam took perfect advantage of that movement happening.”

Exabeam started in user entity and behavior analytics (UEBA) before moving into security information and event management (SIEM), and, more recently, extended detection and response (XDR). It correlates and analyzes data from third-party vendors’ agents and connectors across endpoints, cloud, workloads, and the network.

“The main DNA of the company is around this advanced-analytics offering,” DeCesare said. “It’s the ability for Exabeam to come into a company and take their firewall feed from Palo Alto, their Splunk feed, their CrowdStrike feed, all these different things they’ve bought, and pull those into a central place, and then be able to help the security operations teams prioritize how to go after an insider or outsider threat.”

In addition to scaling Exabeam’s existing security analytics and SIEM business, DeCesare plans to pump money into research and development. “We have customers asking us every day to go into new areas,” he said, adding that compliance would be a next, logical step. “The area of compliance is an area that we can be a very large player in.”

While the company’s threat detection and response capabilities can help security operations teams prioritize which threats to mitigate first, “right after a breach is closed there’s a whole compliance aspect of the same value prop,” he explained.

DeCesare said that while he prefers developing new capabilities organically, he’s not ruling out mergers and acquisitions. “A lot of companies that were really small suffered pretty substantially during COVID,” he said. “If there’s companies that aren’t going to make it on their own, then those are the interesting things for us to consider, especially if they fit our product portfolio the right way.”

DeCesare took ForeScout public in 2017, and in earlier interviews Polak said an initial public offering (IPO) was in the company’s future. An IPO “is still on the table,” and DeCesare said he believes Exabeam “will be quite successful in the public market,” but it’s not a top priority.

The $200 million funding round provided a sufficient cash infusion to ensure that Exabeam doesn’t need to go public, he said. “We have a lot of nuts in the tree for a cold winter,” DeCesare added. Instead of an IPO, “the focus for the next year is building a sustainable business that can carry us for many years.”