Adding on to the list of new hire announcements this week, zero trust company Centrify has revealed that Mark Oldemeyer has joined the company as CFO.
Oldemeyer will be replacing Tim Steinkopf, who became Centrify’s CFO in 2011 and held the role until he replaced company co-founder Tom Kemp as CEO on January 1.
Since Thoma Bravo’s acquisition of a majority interest in the company last year, Centrify has been through some major changes – in addition to the management reshuffle, the company has also been working on spinning off its next-gen access business into a separate company called Idaptive, also owned by Thoma Bravo.
“We saw a tremendous opportunity for both Centrify and Idaptive to drive core product focus in each of their respective markets, while continuing to fulfill the mission of Zero Trust and Next-Gen Access,” said A.J. Rohde, a partner at Thoma Bravo.
“The more we looked at our business, the clearer it became that a huge opportunity existed to create two organizations that can each better focus on innovation, accelerate their respective roadmaps, and ensure customer success,” said Steinkopf. “Our new relationship with PE firm Thoma Bravo gives us the flexibility to execute this strategy and positions both companies for organic and inorganic growth to strengthen their market positions and offer even better PAM and IDaaS solutions, respectively, to secure the enterprise.”
Having an industry veteran with Mark’s experience on board to help lead our company during this next growth phase is incredibly valuable, especially as we look to expand our offerings through targeted acquisitions as well.
Tim Steinkopf, CEO and former CFO, Centrify
According to Steinkopf, Oldemeyer’s experience managing growth as CFO of PowerSchool, an edutech solutions company, is one of the reasons Centrify brought him in.
“Centrify is laser-focused on executing our growth plan in one of the fastest-growing infosecurity markets, Privileged Access Management,” he said. “Having an industry veteran with Mark’s experience on board to help lead our company during this next growth phase is incredibly valuable, especially as we look to expand our offerings through targeted acquisitions as well.”
In addition to his three-year stay as PowerSchool’s CFO, he’s held senior finance roles at companies including SumTotal Systems, Mentor Graphics, CA Technologies, Dell Technologies and Deloitte.
The strategy of growing through acquisition in relation to the cybersecurity market is something we’ve discussed in various posts. Particularly within a ‘niche’ such as privileged access management, it’s hardly an unusual strategy, and it’s one which has met with considerable success for other companies, as our ‘Who Secures The UAE’ project showed. But it’s interesting to see this strategy announced so soon after the spin-off of Idaptive, which suggests that Centrify’s interests lie in other areas.
Centrify’s press releases since Thoma Bravo’s buyout in October have increasingly replaced its old branding of “a leading provider of Zero Trust Security through the power of Next-Gen Access” with “a leading provider of cloud-ready [or occasionally ‘cloud-architected’] Zero Trust Privilege”. Given the strong M&A interest we’ve seen lately in cloud security companies, that’s where I’d put my money, personally.
