Stuart McClure, the co-founder and CEO of Cylance, has decided to leave following BlackBerry’s recent acquisition of his company.
BlackBerry announced the acquisition of Cylance for $1.4 billion in cash in November 2018 and the deal was completed in February 2019. BlackBerry Cylance, the unit that resulted from the acquisition, has launched a couple of new products over the past months.
In an earnings call this week, John S. Chen, BlackBerry’s executive chairman and CEO, revealed that McClure, who served as president of BlackBerry Cylance, decided to “move on” after Cylance’s integration was completed.
“I think I would have wanted him to stay longer, but he had made a personal decision, which we have to respect,” Chen said.
Daniel Doimo, Cylance’s Chief Operating Officer, will replace McClure as president.
“The engineering teams are all intact,” Chen said during the conference call. “The data scientists, the development head, the chief product officers are all staying and working very hard, integrating […] Cylance’s technology with our CTO and our development head. So I feel very comfortable with that. In addition to that, the co-founder of Cylance, Ryan Permeh, is now the Chief Security Architect of BlackBerry.”
Chen’s comments come after at least seven other Cylance executives left the company following the BlackBerry acquisition.
According to CRN, the list of executives who left BlackBerry Cylance to join other cybersecurity firms includes Didi Dayton, Tim Mackie, Louise Cooke, Malcolm Harkins, Chris Scanlan, Abigail Maines, and Brian Stoner.
Prior to founding Cylance, McClure was global CTO and GM at McAfee/Intel Security. SecurityWeek has reached out to McClure via email to learn about his plans for the future, but he has yet to respond.
The value of BlackBerry shares dropped significantly after the company announced its financial results, which were poorer than what analysts had predicted.
Related: Symantec CEO Quits Unexpectedly, Stock Sinks After Missing Estimates
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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