About Michael
Michael started his career back in school back in 1994, when he was helping friends and neighbors with all kinds of IT related questions, their PC issues and network problems. After school and military service, he gained a professional degree in Systems Integration from ATIW, a SIEMENS owned, private vocational college.
This was around or shortly after the explosion of the .COM-bubble in the year 2001. Jobs were hard to find and Michael stayed with SIEMENS as student worker while studying computer science.
During this time, Michael was responsible for developing and maintaining a major SIEMENS-internal e-leraning cloud platform, used by thousands of people world-wide.
Michael left the university after two years and started a career at Internet security startup Webwasher in 2003 and became the first dedicated enterprise support representative for the young company.
After an acquisition by Cyberguard Corp. in 2004, Michael stepped up to lead the local support team and to provide mentoring, guidance to local team members and handled delicate and difficult customer situations as Lead Support Engineer on behalf of the Director Technical Support for EMEA.
Cyberguard itself was acquired by Secure Computing Inc. in 2006 and Michael again stepped up and started building the first international support center for Secure Computing that converged Firewall, Email and Web Filtering Support into a single location. He was promoted to Manager for Support in EMEA, reporting to the VP of global support, and was solely responsible for all EMEA technical support of Secure Computing.
After having built up the support group, stabilizing the customer experience and finally increasing customer satisfaction and NPS, Michael was offered a role in product management to take on product responsibility for the web filtering products of Secure Computing.
In late 2008 Secure Computing Corp. was acquired by McAfee Inc. a leading IT Security vendor. Michael remained in his role and lead the activity for the McAfee Web Gateway product line.
During the restructuring after McAfee’s acquisition by Intel between 2010 and 2014, Michael took on product line responsibility for the web protection cloud service and lead the transformation of this mostly SMB focussed service to an enterprise scale offering including international data center expansion, new UIs, reporting, etc.
During McAfee’s carve out in early 2017 Michael took over full product management responsibility as leader of the PM team for the Web Protection products of the new McAfee.
Since March 2020, Michael is Sr. Manager of Product Management for McAfee, managing the product line and a team of product managers. Michael was instrumental for the release of McAfee’s new Unified Cloud Edge solution.
Short CV
1994 – 1997: IT dude for neighbors, friends and whoever needed help
1997-1998: Military service
1998-2001: Trainee at SIEMENS
2001-2003: Cloud Application Developer at SIEMENS, Studies of Computer Science at Paderborn University
2003-2004: Support Engineer at Webwasher
2004-2006: Lead Support Engineer at Webwasher, a Cyberguard Company
2006-2008: Technical Support Manager at Secure Computing
2008-2009: Product Manager at McAfee, McAfee Web Gateway
2009-2016: Senior Product Manager at McAfee/Intel Security, McAfee Web Protection
since Jan 2017: Running Product Management at McAfee for entire Web Protection product line
since March 2020: Senior Manager of Product Management, full responsibility to GTM, RTM and release of McAfee Unified Cloud Edge
Industry Certifications
Throughout his career, Michael passed several certifications, incl. Pragmatic Marketing, CISSP, CCSK and others.
Cloudsecurity Alliance CCSK – please contact me via Linkedin or Xing to get my details for the validation.
International Information Security Systems Certification Consortium (ISC)² CISSP