For our next installment we introduce you to Fergal Glynn, our Chief Marketing Officer here at Next. Keep reading to find out what he enjoys most about working here and his future aspirations.
What do you do at Next?
I lead our awesome marketing team. We are focused on demand generation and brand awareness in the Data Loss Prevention market. Before Next, I worked at some amazing companies including Shopify, 6 River Systems, Veracode and Fidelity Investments.
How long have you worked at Next?
I’m a relative newbie; I joined Next in 2022. I’m lucky that I’ve inherited a product that has been proven in the market. The product and engineering team here have really set go-to-market up for success with their great work over the last few years. Unlike legacy Data Loss Prevention (DLP), which is what we compete against, our product, Reveal, is a flexible, cloud-native, Machine Learning-powered solution built for today’s threat landscape.
Why did you decide to join Next?
In short, product and opportunity.
It was initially the product that caught my attention. Next took an engineering-first approach to creating this company. By that I mean we started with the product. This is very different from the standard playbook of a lot of cyber companies. Our product is cloud native, it was built with today’s technologies, and was launched in 2020 under the name Ava Reveal. In March of 2022 the product was spun out of Ava Security after that company was acquired by Motorola. In the last couple of years, there has been close to a million R&D hours invested in the development of Reveal.
What convinced me that I wanted to join this company was learning about the market opportunity. Data Loss Prevention is a mature market ripe for disruption. Legacy offerings are expensive, complex and ineffective. Research indicates that DLP is a $3B market opportunity, much of it greenfield. On top of that, 72% of mid-market companies expect to experience a cyberattack. These are companies who have smaller security teams and are often using labor intensive solutions. So the opportunity was obvious: companies are under attack, from the inside and the outside, and the security teams at those companies need time-efficient and effective tools to uncover risk, educate employees and fulfill security, privacy, governance, compliance and regulatory needs.
What is your favorite thing about working at Next?
The people. It’s wonderful to be back working with Connie Stack. Connie has been one of the most influential leaders in my career. Prior to meeting Connie over a decade ago, I had bounced around from role to role… from software developer to sales engineer, to product manager. I loved all those roles, but always had an itch to do more and to learn more about how companies and businesses worked. Connie gave me that opportunity.
I’m also excited to partner again with Lauren Koppelman on the Marketing team. Lauren and I set up the Marketing team in the early days of 6 River Systems and ran some of the most successful campaigns in the material handling industry.
We’ve hired a team that cares about each other, both personally and professionally. We work as a team, we are aligned, when a teammate needs help, there is always someone next to them to pick them up. We hold ourselves accountable and we also take the time to celebrate both the professional and the personal moments that matter.
