CrowdStrike’s Michael Sentonas Promoted From CTO To President
The cybersecurity industry veteran is getting the promotion after serving as CrowdStrike’s CTO since 2020.
New CrowdStrike President Michael Sentonas
CrowdStrike said Wednesday that it’s promoting Michael Sentonas from chief technology officer to president, while also promoting another longtime company executive to the role of global CTO, in the latest executive leadership moves by the cybersecurity giant.
Sentonas had served as CrowdStrike’s CTO since 2020 when he took over the role after the departure of company co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch. In all, Sentonas has been with CrowdStrike for more than half of its existence, having originally joined the company in 2016.
[Related: CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz: Microsoft’s Security Offerings Are A ‘Leaky Lifeboat’]
Meanwhile, CrowdStrike has also promoted Elia Zaitsev, who was formerly CTO of the Americas for the company, to serve as global CTO, the company told CRN. Zaitsev has been with CrowdStrike since 2013, having worked his way up from originally being hired as a sales engineer.
The promotions come several weeks after CrowdStrike built out its executive ranks with a pair of big hires from rival SentinelOne, both of which took on newly added roles at the company.
In a news release Wednesday, CrowdStrike said that Sentonas will report to co-founder and CEO George Kurtz, and will head a number of the company’s functions — including product and go-to-market as well as sales, marketing, product and engineering, threat intelligence and corporate development.
The company’s CTO organization will also continue to report to Sentonas in his role as president.
In the release, Kurtz said that Sentonas brings a “unique skill set” and leadership abilities that “will allow me to engage even more with our customers and partners” as CrowdStrike continues to grow. Kurtz, who co-founded CrowdStrike in 2011, had previously held the title of president at CrowdStrike in addition to CEO.
The list of CrowdStrike executives reporting to Sentonas will include Chief Sales Officer Jim Seidel, CMO Jennifer Johnson, Chief Product and Engineering Officer (Amol Kulkarni) and Senior Vice President of Intelligence Adam Meyers.
Prior to joining CrowdStrike, Sentonas spent 12 years with McAfee, where he held a number of executive roles, ultimately serving as CTO for its Security Connected unit.
Sentonas said in the news release that he’s looking forward to helping “drive our next phase of growth” in the role of president. Revenue during CrowdStrike’s fiscal third quarter, ended Oct. 31, 2022, climbed 53 percent year-over-year to $580.9 million.
In addition to its flagship Falcon endpoint detection and response (EDR) platform, CrowdStrike offers products in numerous other categories including cloud workload protection, identity security and extended detection and response (XDR).
In the recent executive hires from SentinelOne, CrowdStrike brought aboard Raj Rajamani, who had been its chief product officer at SentinelOne, and Daniel Bernard, who had been its chief marketing officer. Bernard was named CrowdStrike’s chief business officer while Rajamani joined as its CPO for data, identity, cloud and endpoint.