eEye Digital Security CEO Ross Brown Steps Down

After just over six months on the job, eEye Digital Security CEO Ross Brown has left the company.EEye spokesman Sean Martin confirmed Brown’s departure Tuesday, saying that the company would issue a statement on the management change on Wednesday.EEye’s board of directors asked Brown to leave, replacing him with Kamal Arafeh, the company’s senior vice president of sales and marketing, said a source familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified.Brown came to eEye, based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., in 2005 from Citrix Systems, and had just been made CEO last September, after first serving as the company’s chief operations officer.Founded in 1998, eEye is a vendor of endpoint security software. The company counts Citigroup, Continental Airlines and the U.S. Department of Defense among its customers.EEye is not the only security vendor to be shifting things at the top. On Monday, San Mateo, California’s Sana Security announced that former Cisco Systems executive Don Listwin has taken over as CEO. He replaces John Zicker, who is staying on as president.Listwin is a Sana investor and board member who at one point had been considered the heir to Cisco CEO John Chambers. He left Cisco in 2000 to run OpenWave Systems.Sana’s “behavior-based” security software is considered to be technically interesting, but the company has struggled to market its products.After undergoing a rash of investment several years ago, the security market is now experiencing a wave of consolidation. In an interview Tuesday, Listwin said that some security companies are going to feel the pinch. “Yes we are going to see a lot of people dropping out and picked up for pennies on the dollar,” he said.But Sana’s new CEO added that he sees growth ahead for his company, even if there may be some challenges.

-Robert McMillan, IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)