Rapid7, the leading provider of security risk intelligence solutions, today announced that Richard Perkett has joined the Company as vice president of engineering. Perkett will manage Rapid7's new innovation center and lead the product development teams for the Company's vulnerability management and penetration testing solutions: Nexpose and Metasploit.
"I was attracted to Rapid7's innovative culture, its dedicated team of security professionals and its unique security products," said Richard Perkett, vice president of engineering at Rapid7. "Rapid7 has aggressive product innovation, development and expansion goals for 2012, including a focus on applying "big data" to security. I'm looking forward to contributing to them and continuing the excellence of the Company's ongoing product development."
Along with expanding the world-class engineering organization at Rapid7, Perkett will be in charge of leading the Company's new innovation center, which is slated to open in Cambridge, Massachusetts in Q2 of 2012. The innovation center will be responsible for accelerating innovation across Rapid7's current product capabilities as well as introducing new products into the marketplace. Rapid7 will hire more than 100 people in 2012, over half of which will join engineering teams located at the new innovation center, as well as in Los Angeles, CA, Austin, TX and Toronto, Canada.
"Rapid7's innovation center in Cambridge will attract world-class engineering talent who will help us accelerate the pace at which we deliver innovative products to our customers; helping them simplify their never-ending security challenges," added Perkett.
Perkett has more than 15 years of experience in engineering, including holding a senior director of engineering role at RSA. In this position, Perkett was responsible for leading the global engineering organization for its Authentication and Identity Protection and Verification products. Prior to joining RSA, Perkett was CTO and co-founder of Salesnet, Inc., a leading company in customer relationship management software.
"We're thrilled for Richard to join Rapid7," said Mike Tuchen, CEO of Rapid7. "The Company's recent funding of $50 million is paving the way for us to build out our development teams in Boston, LA, Austin and Toronto, including opening a new innovation center in Cambridge. Richard will bring his passion and vision to overseeing this expansion and play a key role in solving our customers' complex security challenges with simple, innovative solutions.
Previous industry-first innovations from Rapid7 include:
Rapid7 security analytics software and services reduce threat exposure and detect compromise for 3,000 organizations across 78 countries, including over 250 of the Fortune 1000. We understand the attacker better than anyone and build that insight into our solutions to improve risk management and stop threats faster. We offer advanced capabilities for vulnerability management, penetration testing, controls assessment, incident detection and investigation across your assets and users for virtual, mobile, private and public cloud networks. To learn more about Rapid7 or get involved in our threat research, visit www.rapid7.com.