Nancy Reynolds Leaves Dell to Join Kaspersky Lab

Nancy Reynolds, a veteran channel manager and seasoned security sales executive, has left Dell to assume the senior vice president of sales for the Americas at Kaspersky Lab.

“Seeing Kaspersky Lab’s remarkable growth these past few years has made taking this position an easy decision. The company has done everything right in establishing a prime position in the market to continue its already impressive market expansion,” Reynolds said in a statement this morning. “I know that I am joining a team that is especially focused and driven to becoming a household name in IT security; I am very excited about the opportunity that has been set before me.”

At Kaspersky, Reynolds will be responsible for accelerating Kaspersky’s business-to-business market share through its network of channel partners in North and Latin America. By Kaspersky’s estimates, it is the fourth largest security software company by market share, behind Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro.

“2009 was yet another banner year for Kaspersky Lab and we are primed to take advantage of that momentum moving into 2010 and beyond. As part of our plan for this new year, we are extremely pleased to welcome Nancy Reynolds to the Kaspersky Lab Americas executive team,” said Steve Orenberg, president of Kaspersky Lab Americas, in a statement.

Reynolds rose to channel prominence during her five years at Trend Micro, where she served as vice president of channel and SMB sales for North America. During her tenure at Trend Micro, she earned many industry accolades for building and enabling the company’s channel community.

Most recently, Reynolds served as director of business strategy of global commercial channels at Dell on Greg Davis’ channel team. For the last eight months, she’s been responsible for developing global channel sales strategy in the large enterprise business unit.

Prior to Dell and after Trend Micro, Reynolds was vice president of global channel sales at Palo Alto Networks, which makes application-aware firewalls.

“Nancy is one of the top channel executives in the industry. Her experience, work ethic and passion for winning make her an asset to any organization,” Gary Abad, vice president of channel sales at F5 Networks, wrote on Reynolds’ LinkedIn profile. Abad worked with Reynolds at Novell as vice present of channel sales.

Attempts to reach Dell for comment were unsuccessful.

While Kaspersky Lab is growing globally at a rate of better than 30 percent year over year, it faces some tall challenges in its future growth plans. Nearly two-thirds of its current revenue comes from consumer antivirus and endpoint security sales. Only 27 percent of the company’s global revenues come from B2B sales, and most of that install base is SMB.

While Kaspersky is strong in its home markets – Russia and Eastern Europe – it remains a tertiary security vendor in the Americas. According to data released at Kaspersky’s international press event last month in Moscow, the Americas generate 26 percent of the company’s revenue. Europe and the Middle East account for 66 percent.

Kaspersky executives have made no secrets about the company’s growth ambitions. At the Moscow press event, Chief Operating Officer Eugene Buyakin laid out plans for Kaspersky to expand into data loss prevention, file encryption, storage antivirus, Web security and messaging security. Critical to these plans is a greater penetration into the enterprise market segment, where Kaspersky has relatively little presence.

“[Reynolds] has hit the ground running and has already proven to be a significant contributor to our team. We all have the highest expectations that Nancy will take our current channel commitment to a new and impressive level and position Kaspersky Lab as the model for how best to embrace the channel as we continue to gain share in the IT security market,” Orenberg said.