Coro’s New CEO Prioritizes Channel-Driven Global Expansion

Coro tapped a former Proofpoint, Bitdefender and Fortinet leader as its chief executive to solve complex security problems for businesses with lean IT operations.

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The Chicago-based SMB cybersecurity stalwart tasked Joe Sykora with streamlining internal operations, expanding the company’s international presence and simplifying the partner experience to accelerate Coro’s growth and scalability. Sykora replaces Guy Moskowitz, who has served as CEO since co-founding Coro in 2015 and will transition to president, where he’ll be involved in strategic initiatives and global expansion.

“What I’ve been building up toward in my career is really this step here,” Sykora said. “The reason why I’ve joined Coro was to really, at one point, take the lead and be able to build up the organization that would be channel-first, giving partners predictable margins, supporting MSPs and hybrids and all routes to market.”

Sykora joined Coro in March as senior vice president and general manager of the Americas and Australia-New Zealand after more than four years leading channels and partner sales at Proofpoint. Prior to that, Sykora spent nearly three years leading global sales and channels at Bitdefender and seven-and-a-half years at Fortinet, culminating in a nearly five-year stint leading Americas channels and sales operations (see: Securing SMBs Globally: Coro Raises $100M to Go Into Europe).

What Piqued Sykora’s Interest in Leading Coro

Small and midsize businesses have historically been underserved in the cybersecurity space because of price and product complexity, and Sykora believes Coro can fill this gap with an integrated, simple-to-use and affordable platform. Sykora said Coro’s all-in-one design helps SMBs with lean IT teams deploy and manage security more effectively without requiring heavy overhead or a patchwork of disparate tools.

“No one has a single platform that really scaled to SMB,” Sykora said. “A lot of the enterprises do, but SMB was a market that was left, and a lot of it had to do with price. And that’s what really attracted me to Coro.”

Sykora said Coro’s platform is already mature and feature-rich, with around 15 integrated security modules, including email, endpoint protection and phishing simulation. Looking forward, he wants to create advisory councils for feedback on the product and further simplify the platform, especially for MSPs who manage multiple clients and require consolidated reporting and operational efficiency.

“We already cover all the major areas of cyber,” Sykora said. “I think we can add more features. The product does have simplicity. But we can simplify even more for our users and our MSPs.”

Sykora said he aims to unify Coro’s systems across marketing, sales, operations and finance to reduce friction and improve agility. Coro uses AI-assisted tools for both internal operations and customer-facing processes, and has launched a partner relationship management system that integrates seamlessly with Salesforce and other platforms to create a more unified and responsive partner experience, Sykora said.

“We’ll be streamlining the backend operations of the business to really be built for speed,” Sykora said. “And not saying that things were broken before, but we’re going to be ready.”

How Sykora Will Drive Channel Partner, International Growth

Sykora wants to increase Coro’s international revenue from just 5% today to at least 25 to 30% within the next year and around 50% in the long-term. Coro’s international strategy includes investments in local personnel, building channel infrastructure, implementing two-tier distribution, ensuring product localization and compliance with regional data sovereignty requirements using AWS infrastructure.

“I like running well-balanced machines, and this is something that will strive for the next couple years here,” Sykora said.

A critical early decision Sykora made after joining was transitioning Coro from a mixed sales model to a fully indirect, 100% channel-first model. To make Coro more attractive and frictionless for partners, Sykora said he revamped Coro’s partner program, simplifying it into a two-tier structure that emphasizes predictable margins, incumbency protections and ease of engagement and doing business.

“All of the routes to market and partnerships and relationships that I’ve had in my 29 years in cybersecurity, that’s all something we’re going to embrace and we’re going to make sure that we’re just doing business that makes sense for everybody,” Sykora said.

Rather than measuring partner count, Sykora said he’s focused on the depth of engagement with key partners along with metrics like time-to-quote, order processing efficiency and system integration. On the customer side, Sykora said net promoter scores and platform usage patterns help guide how well Coro is meeting its usability and value propositions.

“We’re not looking to recruit every partner in the world,” Sykora said. “I like to run a focused partner strategy. So we will look at, ‘How are we doing within the partners that we’re partnering with?’ I do not want to become over distributed, so we’ll be looking at that as well.”