India presents a highly dynamic cybersecurity landscape shaped by rapid digital adoption, growing awareness of cyber risk, and increasing regulatory demands. In an exclusive interaction, Mazen Adnan Dohaji, Vice President & General Manager, IMETA, Exabeam, explains to Bhavya Bagga, Business Reporter – Corporate & Leadership, CXO Media & APAC Media, how Exabeam is helping build this security maturity through intuitive AI solutions that help organisations achieve growth and overcome today’s most pressing security challenges.
As the Vice President & General Manager for IMETA, how do you define Exabeam’s strategic vision for this diverse and dynamic region?
India, the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (IMETA) is a wide-spanning region made up of diverse threat landscapes, industries, and regulatory environments. Our strategic vision is to empower organisations with a tailored approach that meets each country’s unique security needs, whether through self-hosted, cloud-native, or hybrid security operations deployment.
With varied levels of technological maturity, what works in the Middle East may not be right for India or South Africa. That’s why we focus on scalable security operations solutions that evolve alongside each organisation’s growth and compliance requirements.
As threats advance, our mission for IMETA is to enable smarter, more proactive security across critical industries. This is where we see AI-powered security solutions making a big difference to the region through greater automation, insight, and strategic oversight. Already, we’ve seen AI make a real difference to how security teams operate in India.
What role does India play in Exabeam’s broader business strategy across IMETA, particularly in terms of market potential and operational capabilities?
India is an incredibly fast-moving region and plays a vital role in our broader strategy across IMETA. With rapid digital transformation, an expanding cybersecurity sector, and an evolving regulatory landscape, it represents a key growth region for Exabeam.
We’re witnessing massive momentum across every sector, from banks embracing digital payment services to governments driving smart cities and e-governance initiatives. This level of transformation is creating a clear and urgent need for modern AI-driven threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR).
Over the past decade, I’m proud of the progress we’ve made in India: building strong relationships with leading government and private organisations, investing in local infrastructure such as our dedicated Google Cloud region, and expanding our team to meet the country’s unique security requirements.
With India emerging as a key growth hub, how do your recent leadership and talent investments in the region align with Exabeam’s regional and global priorities?
Our recent leadership investments in India reflect our commitment to strengthening security operations for customers and partners across the country. The appointments of George Joseph as our Regional Sales Manager and Prabhakar A. R. Kini as Channel Account Manager mark an exciting new phase of growth, bringing deep regional expertise, market insight, and proven customer-first leadership.
Together, they will drive channel strategy, expand our reach in India and IMETA, and build lasting relationships that foster cyber resilience. These strategic appointments align with our global priorities to scale through local expertise, strengthen our partner ecosystem, and deliver innovation to support the region’s evolving security needs.
How is Exabeam planning to expand its customer footprint across India, and what initiatives are being prioritised to enhance customer success and satisfaction?
Across India and globally, we are seeing a huge shift in the role and expectations of security leaders. Their responsibility extends beyond defending against cyberthreats to now driving business resilience and shaping strategy. In India, especially, enhancing security maturity has become a top priority as organisations accelerate digital transformation.
Over the last 10 years, we have laid a solid foundation to support long-term growth in India by expanding our customer success teams in Pune, strengthening R&D, and adding experienced leadership to better support our customers and partners. Our investments in the region are all about putting the right people, tools, and support in place.
At the same time, we are also enhancing how CISOs approach security strategy and planning with the launch of Exabeam Nova, our integrated multi-agent AI, in April this year. Security leaders consistently tell us they need more than insight into emerging threats – they need solutions that empower strategic decision-making. With growing alert volumes, staff limitations, and increasing pressure to stay ahead of adversaries, the ability to act with speed and context is critical.
Our focus is on helping build this security maturity through intuitive AI solutions that help organisations achieve growth and overcome today’s most pressing security challenges.
In terms of go-to-market strategy, what steps is Exabeam taking to strengthen and scale its channel and partner ecosystem in India?
As part of our channel-first strategy, Exabeam has continually refined its partner program over time to serve the needs of the channel. Most recently, we launched the Exabeam APEX Partner Program to give partners the flexibility, resources and backing they need to succeed while our joint customers benefit from a seamless experience.
In India specifically, we’ve hired dedicated leadership, including a Channel Account Manager who is focused on growing and nurturing our local partner network, including Tier 1 channel partners.
Ultimately, our goal is for partners to act as a true extension of Exabeam, delivering the same levels of guidance, reliability, and innovation that customers expect from us directly. This is the foundation we’re building in India, and we see it as a key driver of growth in the region.
Given the unique challenges in India’s cybersecurity landscape, ranging from talent gaps to regulatory complexities, how is Exabeam positioning itself to address these effectively?
India presents a highly dynamic cybersecurity landscape shaped by rapid digital adoption, growing awareness of cyber risk, and increasing regulatory demands. Yet, security leaders continue to grapple with persistent talent shortages, increasing compliance regulations, and the challenge of ensuring security tools keep up with evolving threat tactics.
To support the country, we’ve made deliberate investments. Our Pune office provides hands-on support to help customers navigate stretched resources with day-to-day assistance. We’re also focusing on automation and intelligence as force multipliers. By streamlining investigation workflows, correlating data faster, and reducing alert fatigue, our solutions are designed to ease the operational burden on overstretched security teams while improving detection and response times.
At the same time, we’re staying closely aligned with India’s evolving regulatory environment. Whether it’s sector-specific compliance in financial services or the broader focus on data sovereignty and incident reporting, we’re giving security teams the visibility and reporting capabilities they need to stay compliant.
Whilst India’s challenges aren’t unique, the scale of these challenges are. That’s why our strategy in India is centred around local investment, practical innovation, and deep collaboration.
Where do you see the biggest opportunities for Exabeam in India, particularly across key verticals such as BFSI, government, or critical infrastructure?
India presents a significant opportunity for Exabeam, particularly in high-stakes sectors, including banking and financial services (BFSI), government, and critical infrastructure.
In BFSI, many institutions are looking to move beyond legacy security information and event management (SIEM) platforms that struggle to keep pace with today’s threat landscape. These organisations need faster, more intelligent ways to detect and respond to threats while also meeting growing regulatory demands.
Government agencies are also prioritising cybersecurity as digital governance expands. Our flexible deployment helps them navigate evolving data protection and compliance requirements while modernising their SOCs.
In critical infrastructure, including OT environments, the convergence of legacy systems with modern IT has created new vulnerabilities. IT and operational technology (OT) legacy systems were not built with security in mind because they were once remote and isolated. As technology has evolved, many of these operating systems have become obsolete, unpatched, and vulnerable. With the threat to critical infrastructure rising, there’s an opportunity for service providers to take proactive measures to accurately detect high-risk, anomalous user and entity activity across all operating environments.
How is Exabeam evolving its portfolio of cybersecurity products and solutions, particularly around SIEM, UEBA, and automation to address the specific threat detection and response needs of enterprises across the IMETA region?
Enterprises across the IMETA region are under pressure to mature their security operations quickly, often with limited resources and growing threat complexity. At Exabeam, we’re addressing these challenges with outcome-driven solutions designed to deliver faster detection, smarter investigations, and stronger resilience.
To meet the organisation’s varied security needs, we offer cloud-native, self-hosted and hybrid deployment options. The cloud-native New-Scale Security Operations Platform, self-hosted LogRhythm SIEM, and hybrid add-ons with New-Scale Analytics or LogRhythm Intelligence empower organisations to protect their environments, maximise their existing security investments, and gain total visibility across attack surfaces.
We continuously advance our portfolio with monthly releases to our cloud solutions and quarterly releases to on-premises solutions., This ensures our customers are equipped with the latest tools to stay ahead of emerging threats.
Beyond our SIEM and user and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA) capabilities, a key part of our focus is developing agentic AI for security teams to securely leverage. This assistive AI isn’t just summarising data, it actively supports analysts by recommending investigation steps, correlating context across events, and delivering boardroom-ready reports on security maturity. For security teams across IMETA, this means faster decision-making, greater efficiency, and the ability to proactively advise the SOC.
Looking ahead, what are your top strategic priorities for driving long-term growth, innovation, and market leadership for Exabeam across IMETA?
From my perspective, long-term growth across IMETA depends on three priorities: building strong local partnerships, investing in regional resources, and continuing to evolve our security offering to customers in the region.
IMETA is an expansive region and a one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it. That’s why we’re committed to developing strong partnerships with regional players who understand the unique needs of each region.
Equally important is our ongoing investment in local expertise and infrastructure. As threats evolve, having the right people and resources will remain the critical backbone of long-term growth in the region.
Finally, innovation is at the core of our approach. We’re not just solving today’s SOC challenges but also preparing for those ahead by enabling security teams with AI-driven solutions that shift operations from reactive defence to proactive, strategic security.
