McAfee Hires Former Mercury, CA Sales Exec

Joe Sexton will assume the post of senior vice president of North American sales at McAfee, where he will be responsible for the vendor's field sales and sales engineering and services. He will report to Roger King, executive vice president of worldwide sales.

Sexton comes to McAfee from Mountain View, Calif.-based Mercury Interactive, where he most recently was vice president of field operations for the Americas, overseeing sales and customer service. He joined Mercury in 2001 and left after the firm was acquired by Hewlett-Packard last November in a $4.5 billion deal.

Before joining Mercury, Sexton spent more than a decade at Computer Associates (now known as CA), where he developed a reputation for being channel-friendly, King said. Sexton has also held executive sales positions at EMC and Dallas-based integrator ICI.

"He not only understands the channel, he has been in it and lived it," King said.

While at Mercury, Sexton recast the vendor's product sales and marketing efforts as a more solutions-oriented, C-level sale, and he will have the same goal at McAfee, according to King.

"We have tough point-product competitors, but we can also show CIOs and CFOs superior ROI relative to the point product guys," said King.

Mercury has been under investigation by the government regarding stock options backdating by several top executives between 1997 and 2005, but last week the company reached a $28 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mercury is now under new management.