New AppViewX CEO Eyes Expansion in Identity, Post-Quantum

New AppViewX CEO Dino DiMarino has an audacious goal: Double the company’s annual recurring revenue over the next two-to-three years through product strategy refinement and go-to-market and channel execution.

See Also: Re-Imagining Identity and Access Management for 2025

His appointment as the New York-based company’s chief executive comes a month after AppViewX was bought by private equity firm Haveli. DiMarino replaces Gregory Webb, who became AppViewX’s CEO in November 2019 and will shift to chairman (see: Haveli Purchases AppViewX to Strengthen Identity Automation).

On his to-do list: probe how post-quantum computing and non-human identities will shape the company’s public key infrastructure and certificate lifecycle management capabilities.

DiMarino joined AppViewX Tuesday, and will focus over the next 90 days on internal alignment, client engagement and strategic planning with a focus on understanding the organization, its challenges, and opportunities for growth. His docket includes a visit to the company’s offices in India, meetings sales and marketing teams in North America, and participating in the Gartner Identity Conference and RSA Conference.

Organizations must prepare for cryptographic changes in quantum computing advances, DiMarino told Information Security Media Group. Companies that fail to adapt will experiencing vulnerabilities in their encryption systems, he warned. And as cloud adoption and automation grow, DiMarino said managing and securing machine identities like API keys, service accounts and cloud workloads becomes a top priority.

“We’re already playing at some level of the non-human identity market,” DiMarino said. “We already have certain capabilities around NHI. Where do we double down? Can we go more broad more quickly, or do we want to have a more sequential approach to NHI?”

DiMarino’s strategy focuses on amping up annual recurring revenue in the next few years, emphasizing the importance of gross revenue retention and net revenue retention as indicators of client satisfaction and expansion. Marketing and channel partnerships will play a crucial role in achieving these goals, DiMarino said, along with strong execution in sales and product innovation.

“If you’re keeping customers happy, which the previous operating team did a very good job of doing, it certainly makes your growth within customers – and by proxy, your brand and your market reputation – easier,” DiMarino said.

DiMarino previously a chief revenue officer for more than five years, spending 26 months at email security vendor Mimecast, 22 months at application security vendor Snyk, and 20 months at cloud security firm Qualys. Prior to that, he spent more than three years leading Mimecast’s North American team and more than seven years at authentication vendor RSA, culminating a role leading the Americas team.

When he investigated next steps for his career, he had conversations about three CEO openings, including one outside of cybersecurity. “I immediately gravitated to staying within cybersecurity,” he said. AppViewX is “squarely in between the cybersecurity workflow, mobile, on-premise and cloud infrastructure. That that feels like an area of comfort for me, and where I can add value.”

Another attraction to AppViewX was the company’s significant presence in India, where DiMarino had previously worked with global teams in engineering, support, and product management.

“There’s a lot of innovation and speed to market as it relates to the core product delivery that I saw at AppViewX, and being able to execute on that was also really attractive,” DiMarino said.

Unlike some private equity firms that prioritize immediate cost-cutting and short-term profits, DiMarino said Haveli is taking a long-term growth approach, reinvesting core profits into sales, marketing and R&D to accelerate expansion while maintaining a strong core products. DiMarino said Haveli’s founders have experience with firms like Bain Capital and Vista Equity, which have a track record of scaling companies.

“Their approach with AppViewX is much more of a growth equity play – meaning they’re investing in sales and marketing while keeping a strong focus on R&D,” DiMarino said. “They’re very much taking a long game approach versus what I think people are used to hearing about or seeing from other private equity firms.”