Former Alteryx and VMware sales leader to seize momentum in Zero Trust Segmentation and lead all revenue operations to fuel global growth
Illumio, Inc., the Zero Trust Segmentation company, today announced the appointment of John Lens as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Lens has spent the past 25 years building and leading hypergrowth revenue teams at public companies, including Alteryx and VMware. At Illumio, Lens is responsible for overseeing global revenue operations, reporting to CEO and co-founder Andrew Rubin.
“The time is now for Zero Trust Segmentation. Organizations around the world are rapidly adopting microsegmentation to reduce risk, increase cyber resilience, and stop breaches from spreading,” said Rubin. “John Lens has the ideal background and skillset to lead our entire go-to-market team as the microsegmentation market enters hypergrowth, and his style and approach is the perfect addition to our leadership team. He has a customer and partner first mindset, paired with strong operational rigor, as well as a deep understanding of cybersecurity and segmentation. His track record of success speaks for itself.”
Lens brings 25 years of experience driving growth and scaling global revenue-generating teams. He joins Illumio from Alteryx, where he led the Americas go-to-market organization and positioned the company for growth at scale. Previously, Lens held several senior executive sales leadership roles at VMware, including as vice president of the organization’s Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) portfolio and its virtual network, security, and cloud automation business unit. As the leader of SDDC, he was responsible for more than $3 billion in bookings, which was more than 67 percent of VMware’s SDDC yearly growth. Lens also serves on the board of directors for the Prader-Willi Syndrome Association, a non-profit organization promoting and funding research to enhance the quality of life for those affected by the constant urge for hunger.
“Illumio is the opportunity of a lifetime right now. The Zero Trust market is at a critical junction, and microsegmentation is now a requirement within the Zero Trust security model to reduce risk in modern organizations,” said Lens. “With a mission of bringing ZTS to more organizations around the world, I look forward to collaborating with and growing Illumio’s world-class revenue organizations through the lens of my personal ethos: value the person, value their integrity, and value their contributions. Together with our partner ecosystem, we can, and will, enable more organizations to build cyber resilience by containing and minimizing the impact of breaches and ransomware.”
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95 percent of all organizations have experienced more than one breach, and the average cost of a breach is now $4.45 million, according to IBM Security’s 2023 Cost of a Data Breach Report. Unlike prevention and detection technologies alone, ZTS contains the spread of breaches and ransomware across the hybrid attack surface – reducing risk and increasing cyber resilience. For example, a global law firm isolated servers in less than a minute after a ransomware attack – stopping the breach from spreading into a disaster. According to the Gartner Market Guide for Microsegmentation, 60 percent of enterprises working toward a Zero Trust architecture will use more than one deployment form of microsegmentation by 2026, which is up from less than five percent in 2023.
