Stephen Phillips (Snyk)
Developer security platform provider Snyk has taken on fresh local talent as it works to build out its operations in New Zealand.
In October last year, the UK-based cyber security solutions vendor appointed former Westpac New Zealand chief information security officer (CISO) Stephen Phillips as senior account director in the local market.
Just a month later, the company took on former VMware staff solutions engineer Tessa Davis as its new senior solutions engineer.
Together, the recent recruits give Snyk a deep shot of local tech talent. Before stepping into his role as CISO for Westpac NZ in 2020, Phillips was territory executive for Sumo Logic.
He has also held the roles of country manager for Micro Focus, territory manager for software at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and CTO at CallPlus. Additionally, Phillips has done time at CA Technologies and Symantec.
For her part, Davis spent no fewer than 12 years with VMware, both in Singapore and New Zealand, before making the jump to Snyk late last year. While at VMware, she held a variety of roles, including senior solutions engineer, systems engineer and technical associate.
Credit: Snyk “New Zealand businesses are well known for their ingenuity and are typically early adopters of technologies and processes that help them innovate with speed and resilience,” Davis said. “I’m incredibly excited to join Snyk at a time when security and devops teams are working together to future-proof their path to production for long-term sustainability and growth.
“At Snyk, we take a platform approach with focus on developers and their experience. I’m focused on building on this and creating a thriving ecosystem that helps customers integrate security as early as possible into their software development life cycle,” she added.
In her role at Snyk, Davis is responsible for helping customers to accelerate their path to production, increasing velocity by frictionlessly embedding secure design processes into developers’ everyday practices with the devops tools they already use.
Phillips’ objective at Snyk, meanwhile, is to help customers create value faster while also improving governance and risk management as they embrace cloud native application software development practices and infrastructure.
“New Zealand embraced devops over the past decade and significantly accelerated during the pandemic,” said Phillips. “This pace unfortunately increases opportunity for security vulnerabilities and exploits. Snyk helps identify and fix vulnerabilities early and as easily as possible in this process.
“I am very excited to join Snyk and be part of the company’s next phase of growth,” he added.
According to Snyk, the new appointments were made, in part, to help address increased demand in the region for developer-first security solutions.
“The New Zealand market is moving faster than ever before as organisations realise that developers need to take ownership of security, and Snyk equips them to tackle issues as they arise,” said Asanga Wanigatunga, Snyk’s Australia and New Zealand regional vice president. “Customers are challenging Snyk to think bigger and faster in order to help them achieve their goals.
“This couldn’t be a better time to welcome Tessa and Stephen to the Snyk family to ensure we have unique expertise to support customers with ranging security needs,” he added.
With Davis based in Wellington and Phillips based in Auckland, it is hoped the team will be able to support customers across the country as it continues to grow in the local region.
Indeed, the vendor is expecting to achieve more than 250 per cent year-on-year growth in New Zealand by the end of 2022, with customers ranging from established enterprises across industries including government and financial services, to emerging high growth technology centric organisations.
Moreover, Snyk claims to have already established solid relationships locally with major channel partners such as Datacom.
Snyk appointed former VMware senior sales account executive Marc Tan as its channels and alliances director for Australia and New Zealand in October last year, the same month Phillips was recruited.
Tan was tasked with building out Snyk’s local partner ecosystem through new go-to-market routes and technology alliances.
His appointment built on Snyk’s momentum in the region following its initial A/NZ expansion in January.
