Cyan has appointed Stuart Hutchinson as VP of Sales for EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and APAC (Asia Pacific), to help accelerate our sales growth in the UK and deliver on international expansion plans.
Stuart Hutchinson
Stuart is a former Head of Sales for BlackBag Technologies and joins Cyan from Oxygen Forensics. These roles reflect his passion for continuing to support his previous work as a Detective with the Metropolitan Police Special Branch and Counter-Terrorism Command.
Ian Stevenson, Cyan CEO, said: “Stuart has excellent experience in growing forensics businesses in the UK and internationally, built on a policing background that gives him deep understanding of our customers’ needs. We’re excited to add Stuart’s talent and experience to our team.”
We spoke to Stuart about joining Cyan, his background and what he hopes to achieve in his new role.
Q. Stuart, can you tell us about your career to date prior to joining Cyan?
Stuart Hutchinson: I started out in policing and spent 23 years with the Metropolitan Police. Most of that time was with the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, which then lead to counter-terrorism command. I had a number of roles there and was one of the founding members of the Special Branch High Tech Unit.
With the Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit, I was looking at Islamic extremism and radicalization on the Internet. From there I went over and did some time with the All-Source Hub, an open-source intelligence unit that was set up predominantly for the 2012 Olympics.
From there I moved into the commercial space, first to a company called BlackBag Technologies, which specialized in Apple Mac and iPhone forensics. I was responsible for establishing and growing their international business from a base in the U.K. As part of that role, I was responsible for global sales and operations and then in 2018-19 I moved to Oxygen Forensics, heading up its international sales operations.
Q. What were some of your reasons or deciding factors in joining Cyan?
SH: I was familiar with Cyan, having known Bruce Ramsay (Cyan CTO) since his time at Napier University and the inception of Cyan. What attracted me to Cyan was its core values and mission, the fact it’s a prospering British company with a strong moral compass. The technology we have at Cyan is a game-changer. It’s got the potential to have an unbelievably significant impact across law enforcement globally, and certainly here in the UK. I’ve also been really impressed with the way everything is brought back to the company’s key mission of making the world a safer place. Cyan has a very solid corporate culture with a clear sense of direction and strong talent on board already.
Q. Can you describe what your role with Cyan will be?
SH: My role is to head up sales for Cyan both here in the UK, across Europe and a bit further afield into Asia Pacific. It is to build a sales infrastructure that will allow us to get our products in front of, and into the hands of, as many law enforcement agencies as possible within those regions. Coming from a law enforcement background means I know firsthand what their challenges are. It means I can put myself in the customers’ shoes. I’m very keen for our sales processes to reflect our customer base and their specific requirements.
It’s also about making sure that we can get our message across clearly and succinctly to them, point out the real benefits that we offer, which sometimes needs something more than a traditional sales approach.
Q. How has the landscape of the sector or your area of expertise changed since you started your career? Where do you see it going?
SH: Over the last few years, I think there’s been a fundamental shift to a more cloud-based environment for storing content. Whereas initially, device capacities were going ‘up and up and up and up and up up,’ they seem to have peaked and a lot more content is now going into the cloud. The technology Cyan provides has the ability to transcend the boundaries between physical devices and cloud environments and this means we have the ability to assist in identifying harmful content wherever it exists.
Traditional forensics is always changing. Triage is always going to be significant, simply because of the amount of data that we’re having to deal with, which is going to continue to rise exponentially. I think it is important that we, as a company and as a broader community, make sure we are trying to keep up with that growth as best as possible.
Connect with Stuart Hutchinson on LinkedIn here.