INTERVIEW
AHEAD OF THE CURVE INFOBLOX CEO, JESPER ANDERSEN, TALKS ABOUT HOW THE COMPANY IS TACKLING THE THREAT LANDSCAPE WITH CLOUD-MANAGED DDI AND NETWORK SECURITY SERVICES.
H
ow has Covid-19 affected your business? I would answer that question in two ways. First, there’s the impact on the people side of the business - the culture, the employees. That has been a little tough. Not just on Infoblox but the industry in general. We call it the Great Resignation. Everyone in high tech is experiencing higher attrition than usual. And a part of that is because many people we hired in the last two years have never really met another Infoblox person face to face; so they don’t have quite the same feeling for the company. But that is on the employee side. On the business side, it’s been super positive for us as this move to work from home has been good for us. I can give you a good example of one 34
CXO INSIGHT ME
APRIL 2022
of the largest professional services companies in the world. They had to figure out how 300,000 employees could work from home in a secure way, literally overnight, when the pandemic hit. We are critical in that mix. We are rapidly becoming a half a billiondollar company. We’re growing at over 20%, and I’m very proud that we are approaching 1800 employees. Are you investing in more resources in the region? We have been hiring a lot of people here over the last couple of years to make sure we have the right coverage across the Gulf countries and Africa. We have hired a much bigger team in Saudi Arabia. So I am always looking to add more people where there’s demand.
Do you have a cloud-first approach now? When I came to Infoblox seven and a half years ago, my vision was that just like compute, and storage had moved to a cloud-managed world, the same thing would happen in networking. That was one of the reasons why I left Cisco because I just didn’t see them having the ability to do that. Around six years ago, we started building our cloud-managed platform, which we call BloxOne. First, we launched BloxOne Threat Defense, and a couple of years ago, BloxOne DDI, the industry’s first and true cloud-managed DDI solution. It means that controller’s single pane of glass management is in the cloud, and you can deploy DNS and DHCP in containers, wherever you want
