Google Cloud Hires Former Nutanix, VMware, Pure Storage Exec

Google Cloud nabs Dominick Delfino to lead the cloud computing giant’s worldwide security sales charge as Google’s $5.4 billion acquisition of Mandiant draws near.

Dominick Delfino

Google Cloud has hired Nutanix and Pure Storage’s former chief revenue officer, Dominick Delfino, as its new global vice president of cybersecurity sales as the company continues to double down on security in a move to differentiate itself from the cloud competition.

Delfino has over two decades of high-level executive experience, including a 15-year stint at Cisco from 2000 to 2014, as well as top sales roles at VMware.

“I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as Global Vice President – Cyber Security Sales at Google!” said Delfino in a LinkedIn post.

His LinkedIn post has already garnered over 270 comments and more than 1,500 reactions, with congratulations from the likes of Frank Rauch, head of worldwide channel sales at Check Point Software Technologies, as well as executives hailing from Palo Alto Networks, VMware and Google Cloud.

[Related: First-Ever Google Cloud Regions To Hit Asia-Pacific Countries]

“Welcome Dom,” said Sunil Potti, general manager and vice president of Cloud Security at Google Cloud, on LinkedIn.

Delfino could not be reached for comment by press time.

Dominick Delfino’s Career At Cisco, Nutanix, Pure Storage And VMware

Delfino was previously Nutanix’s CRO for less than a year before joining Google Cloud.

In November, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said Delfino was “the perfect person” for the CRO role.

“His clear strategic orientation, passion and enthusiasm are balanced with a lens of execution and discipline,” said Ramaswami when Delfino was hired.

Nutanix recently announced it was laying off 270 employees.

Prior to Nutanix, Delfino was CRO of Pure Storage for approximately one year, responsible for leading and growing the global sales organization and all routes to market. He was also responsible for defining new, differentiated go-to-market strategies.

He spent six years at VMware from 2014 to 2020 in various top sales executive roles, including leading the entire sales organization for the America’s as general manager and senior vice president of the Americas. He was also senior vice president of worldwide sales for VMware’s Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) business.

The majority of Delfino’s career was spent at Cisco in technical roles, including as senior director of Cisco’s global data center and virtualization systems engineering and technology strategy throughout the 2000s.

Delfino started his IT career working at solution provider powerhouse Dimension Data as a lead systems architect in 1996.

Thomas Kurian’s Plan To ‘Industrialize’ Cybersecurity

In an interview with CRN this year, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said his company is shaking up the complex security landscape and addressing the fear every organization faces today.

“What we are trying to do is take cybersecurity and industrialize it so that people don’t have to always live with this worry, ‘Is tomorrow the day I get told that my systems have been breached?’” Kurian told CRN.

Some examples of differentiated cloud security innovation driving customer wins include its zero-trust enterprise platform BeyondCorp, the company’s large portfolio of data protection solutions, and Google Cloud’s open strategy of allowing customers to not only protect workloads that run in Google Cloud, but also in their own enterprise—thanks to Kurian forming partnerships with cybersecurity heavyweights Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike, to name a few.

“As a result, you can look publicly at the threat data and the reports on breaches [and see that] we have a very secure cloud approach that we are confident in,” said Kurian.

Google Cloud’s strategy to win more cloud mindshare via its security technology is getting a major shot in the arm with Google’s upcoming blockbuster acquisition of incident response superstar Mandiant.

Google Nears Closure Of Mandiant Acquisition

In one of the largest acquisitions in Google’s history, the company is expected to acquire Mandiant for $5.4 billion later this year.

The acquisition will provide Google Cloud with real-time, in-depth threat intelligence technology and expertise that Mandiant has built from working with the largest organizations in the world on the frontlines of cybersecurity.

In July, the blockbuster Google-Mandiant merger became one step closer to reality with the U.S. Department of Justice ending its antitrust inquiry with no objections to letting the deal proceed.

Some observers became a bit alarmed in May when the feds requested more information from the companies, indicating regulators were conducting a more than perfunctory antitrust review of the proposed transaction. But the DOJ’s action appears to put antitrust concerns to rest.