David Pieterse

Chief Operating Officer, Go-To-Market Trellix

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

David Pieterse is Chief Operating Officer for Go-To-Market at Trellix, the cybersecurity company, appointed in August 2026 to run growth strategy, customer relationships and strategic partnerships as a single operating function rather than as a conventional sales organisation. He has spent more than two decades in enterprise technology revenue leadership across cybersecurity, enterprise software and data analytics, working on three continents. What distinguishes his record is a specific and uncommon competence: he has now led the revenue organisation of two consecutive companies straight through their acquisitions — Recorded Future into Mastercard, and Snow Software into Flexera. Selling while a company is being absorbed is the point at which most revenue organisations lose momentum, customers and people, and it is what he has been hired to do twice.

Career Highlights

• Named Chief Operating Officer – Go-to-Market at Trellix in an announcement dated 24 August 2026, with oversight of go-to-market operations spanning growth strategy, customer relationships and strategic partnerships.
• Appointed alongside a new Chief Information Security Officer as part of a paired strengthening of Trellix’s commercial and security leadership.
• Served as Chief Revenue Officer of Recorded Future, described as the world’s largest threat-intelligence company, leading all global revenue functions through its acquisition by Mastercard.
• Served as Chief Revenue Officer of Snow Software from October 2021, leading its global revenue organisation through its acquisition by Flexera.
• Was Senior Vice President of Global Revenue at Kong Inc., the API and service-connectivity platform.
• Held leadership positions at Cloudera, in data analytics, and at Hewlett Packard.
• Brings more than 20 years of global software sales leadership across three continents, with a stated focus on customer-centric selling, multi-segment digital transformation and accelerating SaaS adoption.
• On joining Trellix, argued that the cybersecurity market is at a genuine inflection point and that Trellix has the security foundation, threat intelligence and team to lead it.

Professional Journey

Pieterse’s career has moved through the layers of the enterprise technology stack in roughly the order the industry itself moved: hardware and services at Hewlett Packard, big-data infrastructure at Cloudera, API connectivity at Kong Inc. as Senior Vice President of Global Revenue, and then software asset management at Snow Software. Each step took him closer to the category he now works in, and each was a company selling a technical product to technical buyers.

Snow Software appointed him Chief Revenue Officer in October 2021, to lead its global sales organisation under President and Chief Executive Vishal Rao. The release at the time emphasised his customer-centric approach and his multi-segment, digital and SaaS experience, and noted that his more than 20 years of global software sales leadership spanned three continents. Snow was subsequently acquired by Flexera, and Pieterse led the revenue organisation through that transition.

He then became Chief Revenue Officer of Recorded Future, the threat-intelligence company, where he led all global revenue functions — and again saw the company through an acquisition, this time by Mastercard. Two consecutive revenue leadership roles that both ended in the company being bought is either an unusual run of luck or a specific skill that acquirers and their targets value; the Trellix announcement treats it as the latter.

Trellix hired him in August 2026 as Chief Operating Officer – Go-to-Market, a title that deliberately reaches wider than Chief Revenue Officer: growth strategy, customer relationships and strategic partnerships together. His new chief executive is Vishal Rao — the same executive who hired him at Snow Software five years earlier. Trellix announced him alongside a new Chief Information Security Officer, framing both hires around an AI-driven shift in the threat landscape, with Rao arguing that the transformation of the threat-actor playbook by AI demands a proactive, AI-native security response.

Education

No education could be established for this subject. Neither Trellix’s nor Snow Software’s appointment announcements mention a degree, institution or field, and a search targeted specifically at his educational background returned nothing.