AirDefense says it is expanding its management team with the addition of Jay Johnson as vice president of sales and Richard Rushing as vice president of security services.
They are rejoining Jay Chaudhry, chairman and chief executive officer, with whom they worked before. AirDefense’ other managers include Chief Technology Officer Scott Hrastar and Chief Security Officer Fred Tanzella.
“AirDefense has assembled the best possible team to execute our vision to serve enterprises with intrusion protection for wireless LANs,” Chaudhry, who founded AirDefense last year with Hrastar, said in a statement. “Our team represents the most seasoned executives from my experiences in the last 10 years running security and wireless-focused technology businesses.”
Chaudhry, Johnson and Rushing co-founded SecureIT in 1996. One year later, VeriSign Inc. acquired SecureIT, which continued its growth as the network security services division of VeriSign. Chaudhry led the network security services division of VeriSign until 1999, when he left to form a series of technology businesses that included Air2Web, CoreHarbor and CipherTrust.
After Chaudhry left VeriSign, Johnson led the network security services division at VeriSign until his retirement in 2001. Before taking that role, he headed up sales. In his experiences at VeriSign and SecureIT, Johnson led a team of more than 90 employees to achieve high double-digit revenue growth and signed business with more than half of the Fortune 100 companies in the United States. Before starting SecureIT, Johnson was vice president of business development for GE Capital TMS.
Rushing, a recognized security expert and featured speaker at conferences such as Networkworld+Interop and SANs Security Conferences stayed on at VeriSign as chief technical officer until he joined AirDefense this month.
AirDefense: www.airdefense.net
