Q&A with Rob Jenks: Taking Tanium Growth and Partnerships to the Next Level

Rob Jenks has joined Tanium as our Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy. It’s a critical role that will drive Tanium’s strategic direction through business development and technical-alliance efforts. He’ll also be innovating on how we deliver value to our customers.

Rob joins us after an eight-year stint at enterprise software company C3.ai, spending most of his time there as Vice President of Strategy and Alliances.

In his new role, Rob will lead strategic and technology alliances to help Tanium scale, especially across the underserved mid-market. He’ll work with technology and channel partners to ensure they find value in selling Tanium solutions and will be pivotal in taking our partnerships with Salesforce, Google, IBM, and others to the next level.

Longer-term, Rob will focus on other potential areas of growth adjacent to the core Tanium business, driving growth for the business and value for our customers and partners.

We sat down with Rob to find out more.

Why are you excited to join Tanium?

Rob Jenks: People are the most important component of an organization, and they’ve been incredible here across the board. Everyone I’ve spoken with has been very smart, engaged and friendly. It’s been impressive.

More broadly, Tanium holds a highly differentiated position in the security and endpoint management market. We have a unique platform and accurate real-time data that can power tremendous innovation across a range of applications.

Taking this perspective, we can drive toward Tanium’s pursuit of being a global technology leader — not just in security but also in big data, IoT, AI, and other foundational next-generation technologies.

What impact are you looking to have on our customers?

Rob Jenks: The most important thing for me is a ruthless focus on delivering business value to customers. Tanium is a core technology solution for these organizations but must keep adding value: saving them money, enabling them to generate more revenue, and helping to reduce risk.

As we think about scaling, it’s my job to ensure we keep doing this for existing customers and also determine how to communicate and deliver this value for a different set of customers, which may happen through partners. Ultimately, we want businesses to be doing better because they’re using Tanium.

How vital are Tanium’s tech alliances and partnerships for our customers?

Rob Jenks: With respect to the cloud, I think the partnerships Tanium has struck with Google, AWS, IBM and others have been well-judged. The focus has been on optimizing for the cloud with a broad technology portfolio for deployment, which customers will appreciate. Elsewhere, the embedding of Tanium data and insight into third-party enterprise and workplace solutions multiply that business value we were talking about for customers.

I see some exciting new avenues to explore here in the future — new ways we can use Tanium data to deliver value. One may be in the fast-growing IoT and connected-devices space, where security is absolutely paramount and often improperly addressed. Another may be in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). More of these doors start to open through technology and other partnerships.

On a more personal level, what are some fun facts you can tell us about yourself?

Rob Jenks: Not many people will necessarily guess this about me, but I was born and grew up in India. It was a small town south of Bangalore where my parents were teaching in an international school. Closer to home, I also have a pilot’s license, and there’s a seaplane base five miles down the road that I’ve been itching to use. I’d love to get back in the air again.

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Learn more about how Tanium’s technology alliances extend the power of the Tanium platform to help our customers take on their toughest endpoint management, security and compliance challenges.