Salesforce Loses Another Security Leader in Executive Exodus
(Bloomberg) -- A second Salesforce Inc. cybersecurity executive has left the company within the span of a few months, another shake-up in the top ranks of the software maker that is struggling with slowing revenue growth.
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Taher Elgamal, chief technology officer of security, announced Wednesday in a LinkedIn post that he is leaving Salesforce after 10 years with the company. Elgamal is credited as a pioneer of SSL, a formative encryption method, according to Salesforce.
He is the second high-level cybersecurity official to leave Salesforce, following Executive Vice President Mark Carter, who departed in November. Salesforce has seen multiple high-ranking exits in recent months, including co-Chief Executive Officer Bret Taylor, and top leaders for Slack and Tableau.
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A Salesforce spokesperson said the company was “grateful” to Elgamal for his tenure and wished him well. “Chief Trust Officer Vikram Rao and our deep bench of cybersecurity experts, including former CIA Chief Information Officer William MacMillan, continue to partner with our customers to raise the bar for trust in the digital economy,” the spokesperson added in a statement.
Elgamal has joined Evolution Equity Partners, a cybersecurity venture capital firm, as a general partner, according to his LinkedIn post. Elgamal first met Salesforce co-Founder Marc Benioff in the late 1990s, when Benioff became an angel investor in Elgamal’s company Securify, Elgamal said in a December interview with Modern CTO. At the time, Benioff was still working at Oracle Corp. Elgamal joined Salesforce years later because he was interested in establishing cloud-based application security at a time when it wasn’t yet industry standard, he said in a separate October interview with Bill Buchanan on YouTube.
Last week, Salesforce began culling 10% of its workforce, about 8,000 people, in an effort to cut costs. The company, which is the top provider of customer management software, has been battling slowing growth and investor pressure to improve profit. In the fiscal third quarter, which ended Oct. 31, Salesforce reported its smallest year-over-year quarterly revenue increase since becoming a public company in 2004. It projected sales growth would be even less in the current period, which ends this month.
(Updates with company comment in the fourth paragraph.)
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