Dave Rogers Joins Cyera As Channel Chief: ‘No Limit’ To AI Security Partner Opportunity

Rogers, a cybersecurity and channel veteran who was most recently at Palo Alto Networks, joins data and AI security unicorn Cyera in a bid to accelerate its work with partners.

Cyera announced Monday it has hired a cybersecurity and channel veteran, Dave Rogers, as channel chief in a move by the data and AI security unicorn to accelerate its work with partners.

Rogers, who had most recently been at Palo Alto Networks, said in an interview with CRN that he’s coming aboard fast-growing Cyera to help partners capture the massive opportunities around enabling AI adoption for their customers.

“There’s no limit to the amount of opportunity for partners when they’re ingrained in the customer’s most important project,” Rogers said.

All in all, “this is an opportunity that’s bigger than cloud security,” he said.

Rogers, whose title at Cyera is head of global channels and alliances, joins the four-year-old company several months after it raised $300 million in funding at a $3 billion valuation.

A top player in the red-hot space of data security posture management (DSPM), Cyera has recently expanded to offer data loss prevention (DLP) — and last week debuted its Omni DLP offering that provides unified, adaptive data security across all environments and tools.

In an interview with CRN, Cyera CEO Yotam Segev said that bringing aboard Rogers is major validation for the partner opportunities ahead.

“I think that he will position us in a much stronger way within the channel community for the next phase of growth,” said Segev, who co-founded the company in 2021.

Prior to joining cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks as senior vice president in August 2024, Rogers had spent six years at Netskope including as its senior vice president for global alliances and channel sales from 2022 to 2024.

Prior to that, Rogers was vice president of cloud security business development at solution provider powerhouse Optiv, while earlier roles included positions at Dell EMC and IBM.

Cyera’s hire of Rogers is being announced in connection with RSA Conference 2025, taking place this week in San Francisco. The company also disclosed it has hired Sol Rashidi, who previously held executive roles at companies including Amazon Web Services and Estée Lauder, as chief strategy officer for data and AI, while also naming Zscaler veteran Amit Raikar as vice president of strategic alliances.

While Cyera has not disclosed specifics on the size of its business by revenue, the company said in March that it has grown its revenue by 26X over the past two years.

For Rogers, the top priorities as channel chief will be to ensure that Cyera provides the resources, incentives and enablement for partners that keeps pace with the rapid growth of the company, he told CRN.

“Ultimately, my charter coming into Cyera is to make sure that we’re making all of the investments that the partner community needs to make sure that we can meet the customer demand,” he said.

What follows is an edited portion of CRN’s interview with Rogers.

What prompted this move to join Cyera?

I had no expectations that I would be leaving Palo Alto so shortly. Amazing company, great people. But I had a conversation with a friend at Cyera, and I knew how fast it was moving. I could hear it from partners. There were a lot of connections from Netskope over to the Cyera, and I knew it was moving quick. [Then] I got a call from a couple members of the leadership team saying, “I know you’re not really ready to come over, but let us tell you why [you should].” I was blown away at the momentum that Cyera has after just three years. They are doing more in revenue, in pipeline, in mindshare with customers and the partner community than companies who have been around a decade. Honestly, the decision was super easy. It went from, “I would never do that this quick,” to “I can’t not do this — I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t jump on that opportunity.”

How would you describe how large of an opportunity there is ahead for Cyera and its partners?

If you want to be great at AI, you need incredibly highly tuned LLMs. You need more data than less in order to be extremely successful. And the only way to get more data is having a governance infrastructure in place that allows you to quickly determine what data should or should not be in the models — and how to bring that into the organization with one governance structure out of all of it. So it’s being able to take all the different ways that people think about leveraging DLP or DSPM — and all the disparate tools across email, file etc. — and pull that all together. This is an opportunity that’s bigger than cloud security. It’s bigger than when I moved to cloud security 10 years ago. [Cyera] is a very specific solution to the biggest opportunity for our customers and for our partners, and it’s an awesome partner opportunity. This is an incredible consulting opportunity. Deployment is super critical, and [it’s also] an environment that ultimately has to fit into a managed services infrastructure.

What are some of your biggest priorities in the channel chief role at Cyera?

The adoption — whether it’s with the customers or the partner community — is happening so fast right now that we have to be just as focused on scaling and making sure that we’ve got the right enablement in place, the right infrastructure in place to be able to support the partners. And ultimately, my charter coming into Cyera is to make sure that we’re making all of the investments that the partner community needs to make sure that we can meet the customer demand — and that the partner is leading the consulting, leading the implementation, selling the product and then driving adoption — and then right through that renewal process and expansion for us.

How would you describe the AI opportunity for partners that work with Cyera?

Every partner wants to be a strategic advisor to the customer. And everybody is going through an internal process of evaluating how fast they can move with AI, how quickly they can deploy AI. How do you quantify the value — whether that is cost reduction or net new lines of business or acceleration of revenue? We’re in the tip of the spear of that. When you can pull all the data together quickly and say that I can confidently use AI, leverage AI, leverage the tools, create repeatable processes for different parts of the organization — knowing that I have the data governance infrastructure in place — is incredibly valuable. For every partner that we talk to, every one of those conversations ends with, “And there’s budget. There’s prioritization.” There’s no limit to the amount of opportunity for partners when they’re ingrained in the customer’s most important project. We’ll be a component of those, we’ll be a subset of those. But we’re a strategic differentiator for them that will bleed over into all of the other dollars in funding that come as a part of all of those AI projects.

Everyone in the partner community that has been security focused — or maybe even relatively new to security — has a new opportunity that they haven’t had before. [They can now] have a conversation that is a much higher-level and much more strategically relevant. That confidence of knowing what data you have, and what can be pulled in [for AI usage], is amazing.

What is your overall message to partners?

Cyera is going to accelerate the adoption of AI. And AI is the most important conversation, outside of security, for every customer today. So when you can be at the tip of the AI conversation and the security conversation and the strategic advisor, you’re in a spot where you’re going to be successful for a very, very long time with those customers. And it is not a conversation that is complicated. We just haven’t had the tools and investments that Cyera has made to be able to go that fast and be that relevant. The timing couldn’t be better.