ForeScout, a 16-year-old cybersecurity firm based in San Jose, Calif., is putting people in place to plan for a possible initial public offering.
ForeScout appointed James Beer, executive vice president and chief financial officer of McKesson (MCK), the biggest pharmaceutical distributor in the United States, to its board of directors this week, the company said. (McKesson took in $181 billion in revenue last year, jumping to fifth from 11th on this year’s Coins2Day 500 list.)
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Beer joined the health care giant McKesson in October 2013 after serving seven years as chief financial officer of Symantec (SYMC), a cybersecurity company best known for its antivirus software. Beer assumed Symantec’s top finance job in February 2006, after the abrupt departure of its former CFO, Greg Myers. (Myers had resigned along with several other executive team members following the company’s $10.5 billion acquisition of Veritas, the data storage business that Symantec recently sold for $8 billion to a group of investors led by the private equity firm Carlyle Group(CG).)
Prior to Symantec, Beer served as the chief financial officer of American Airlines (AAL) (formerly AMR Corp.) And as a consultant at Arthur Andersen, since rebranded as Accenture (ACN). The Harvard MBA-holder also sits on the board at Celesio, a German health care company.
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“James’ 30-plus years of in-depth global business and financial experience working in highly regulated industries will add invaluable perspective to our board of directors,” Michael DeCesare, president and CEO of ForeScout, said in a statement.
Investors last valued ForeScout, which sells hardware appliances that monitor network-connected devices, at $1 billion as part of a late-stage $76 million funding round at the beginning of the year. The company has raised $156 million over the course of seven rounds to date.
At the time of the funding, DeCesare, former CEO of Intel (INTC) Security’s recently spun-off division McAfee, told Coins2Day that he expected to take ForeScout public later in the year. Months later he told Coins2Day, speaking on behalf of cybersecurity execs mulling the public markets , that a lackluster debut by SecureWorks (SCWX), a security services provider spun off by Dell earlier this year, was “making us all sit back and re-evaluate.”
ForeScout reported more than $125 million in revenue last year.
Beer joins a board that includes Hezy Yeshurun, ForeScout cofounder and chairman; David DeWalt, ex-CEO of FireEye (FEYE); Enrique Salem, managing director at Bain Capital Ventures and former CEO of Symantec; and others.
“The proliferation of traditional and Internet of things (IoT) devices in the enterprise has created an attractive opportunity for ForeScout to shape the market,” Beer said in a statement.
