Citrix executive named new Sourcefire chief

A former sales executive at virtualization vendor Citrix Systems Inc. will take over the helm at Sourcefire Inc.

Sourcefire said that John C. Burris will take over the CEO role of the company effective July 14. Burris was head of worldwide sales and services at Citrix. He replaces E. Wayne Jackson, who announced in February that he would step down from the top post. Jackson has remained on board until the company’s Board of Directors could choose a replacement.

Jackson oversaw an eventful 2007. The company went public in March 2007 after its acquisition of Check Point Software Technologies Inc. was fraught with concerns about the Israeli-owned Check Point buying a U.S. security firm. The acquisition was abandoned in 2006. Sourcefire also acquired the intellectual property of ClamAV, an open source antivirus project in August.

“During my six years at Sourcefire, we have grown from a small security start-up to one of the most respected companies in our industry,” Jackson said in a statement.

The company also revamped its strategy last year calling it Enterprise Threat Management. It still uses Snort, the open source packet-sniffer, as the backbone of the strategy. The company said the goal was to combine intrusion prevention, network behavior analysis and network access control with vulnerability assessment.

Analysts have said that Sourcefire’s challenge has been to differentiate itself against the likes of much larger competitors, Juniper Networks, Cisco Systems, ISS (now part of IBM Global Services and TippingPoint Technologies (now a division within 3Com).