Syam Nair joins Zscaler as CTO
Zscaler announced that Syam Nair has been appointed as the company’s Chief Technology Officer and EVP of Research and Development.
In this role, Nair will be responsible for driving the research and development engines to expand Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange platform, accelerate AI/ML innovations, and further scale the largest security cloud in the world. Nair will join Zscaler’s senior executive team on May 24, 2023.
“I am excited to welcome Syam to the Zscaler’s leadership. He has real-world experience in leading and scaling engineering and product development teams that accelerated innovation cycles at Salesforce, one of the largest SaaS and cloud platforms in the world,” said Jay Chaudhry, CEO, Zscaler. “As we drive our business to reach $5 billion in annual recurring revenue, with eyes set to go much farther, Syam’s proven experience will play an important role in scaling Zscaler’s platform and organization.”
Nair will bring more than 25 years of engineering and product development leadership with expertise in ground-up incubation and in leading large teams at Salesforce and Microsoft through R&D transformations. During his tenure at Microsoft, Nair was part of the leadership team responsible for building and the accelerated expansion of planet-scale globally distributed Azure data services.
At Salesforce, Nair’s leadership has been a driving force for key strategic innovations, including Salesforce Genie, a hyper-scale CRM Data Platform, while continuing to integrate inorganic innovations and scaling the AI-powered customer engagement platform for accelerated growth and 10x Scale.
Nair and his leadership team were also responsible for the vision and execution of next-generation AI, Search, and Analytics experiences.
“I am delighted to join the Zscaler leadership team and drive innovation and cloud platform scale at the industry leader in cloud security,” said Nair. “Enterprises are at the cusp of a technology evolution where massive amounts of data are converging in the cloud and being put into action with advanced AI and cybersecurity technologies.
“Zscaler is at the forefront of this transformation with access to the largest, most valuable data pool for cloud security, with more than 300 billion transactions per day. As part of this leadership team, I am very excited to drive the innovation vision and continue to accelerate and deliver on the AI/ML-led cybersecurity transformation for our customers with a hyper scale Zscaler platform,” concluded Nair.
Nair holds a master’s degree in computer science and applications Engineering from Goa University and a Master of Business Administration from Indiana University – Kelley School of Business.