Here are some of the latest executive hirings, promotions, and staff changes that happened in December. If you’d like SDxCentral to report on your company’s movers and shakers, or if you’ve got a tip about layoffs and restructuring, please send the information to Emma Chervek ([email protected]) for inclusion in the monthly headcount column.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wants you to unplug your hardware firewall — for good. The vendor unveiled Oahu, a new program that aims to convince enterprises to ditch their legacy firewalls in favor of its cloud-native ones, and it could even win you a trip to the aloha state.

The program’s name is a tongue-in-cheek jab at rival firewall vendor Palo Alto Networks. Over the course of the pandemic, Prince claims many of his friends living in the Palo Alto, California area took the opportunity to move to Oahu, Hawaii. So when it came time to get people to abandon their Palo Alto Networks firewalls, Cloudflare landed on Oahu.

According to Prince, hardware firewalls from the likes of Palo Alto Networks or Fortinet fail to meet the needs of a modern, distributed workforce, while virtual appliances from vendors like Zscaler can’t scale to keep up with customer demand.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) $1.3 billion bet on high-performance computing (HPC) appears to be paying off. The business segment alone accounted for $1 billion of the company’s $7.35 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2021.

“HPE is at the center of several compelling megatrends: the explosion of data at the edge, the mandate for a cloud experience everywhere, and the need to extract value from data to generate insights,” CEO Antonio Neri said during the vendor's Q4 earnings call, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript.

All of these trends contributed to the strength of HPE’s HPC and artificial intelligence (AI) business unit during the quarter.

“Thirty three of the top 100 most powerful supercomputers in the world were built by HPE. This is more than any company,” Neri boasted on the call.

Puppet named Gene Hall as CMO.

Bright Machines appointed Sudhanshu Verma as chief development officer.

Axis Security appointed Jason Pishotti as chief customer officer, Omar Fakhri as VP of customer care, and Chris Hines as VP of product marketing.

Apps Associates named Lydie Fox as chief people officer.

SolarWinds appointed Jeff McCullough as VP of worldwide partner sales.

Immersive Labs appointed Jennifer Johnson to its board of directors.

Vena named Hugh Cumming as CTO.

SafeBreach appointed Avishai Avivi as CISO.

Infosec Institute appointed Monty Schmidt as CTO.

Codasip appointed Ron Black as CEO.

Verizon announced the appointment of Krista Bourne as Verizon Consumer Group’s COO.

iXsystems appointed Mario Blandini as VP of marketing.

Samsung Electronics promoted Jong-Hee Han to vice chairman and CEO.

Banyan Security appointed Den Jones as CISO.

Indico Data hired Bob More as chief revenue officer.

Open Systems appointed Gavriella Schuster to its board of directors.

MemryX appointed Keith Kressin as CEO.

Interface Security Systems appointed Daniel Bordeleau as chief people officer.

Redgate Software appointed Jakub Lamik as CEO.

NetApp appointed Harvinder Bhela as chief product officer.

Starburst named Javier Molina as chief revenue officer.

TigerGraph appointed Pekka Kostamaa as VP of engineering.

Optiv appointed Jason Lewkowicz as SVP of cyber defense and applied security.

Navisite appointed Jason Facer as CFO and Peter Salamanca as COO.

Cradlepoint announced the appointment of Ben Carr as CISO.

Boomi appointed David Meredith as CEO.

Tricentis appointed Chris Collins as chief customer officer. 

Kong appointed Juliette Rizkallah as CMO.

Domino Data Lab appointed Ken Tacelli as COO and Grant Ho as CMO.

Druva appointed Yogesh Badwe as chief security officer.

Protegrity appointed Terri McBride as EVP of global people and Kaitlin Hartshorn as VP of legal affairs.

Reblaze named Ziv Oren as CEO.

Veeam appointed Anand Eswaran as CEO.

Helmut Reisinger resigned as CEO at Orange Business Services.

Tanium appointed Jim Whitehurst to its board of directors. 

DoCoMo named Toru Maruoka and Masato Kuroiwa to its board of directors.

PKWARE appointed Mike Wood as VP of product management.

Quad9 appointed Timo Koster as chief strategy officer. 

Keeper Security appointed Gerardo Dada as CMO.