Zscaler names Ross Tackett as Chief Revenue Officer

Tackett, previously Head of Worldwide Sales, takes the CRO role on 1 October, succeeding Mike Rich who steps down for personal reasons.

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Zscaler has appointed Ross Tackett as its Chief Revenue Officer, effective 1 October 2026. Tackett, who has spent three years at the NASDAQ-listed zero-trust security vendor, steps up from his previous position as Head of Worldwide Sales. He will oversee global revenue operations, the sales organisation, strategic partnerships, and go-to-market execution.

Tackett succeeds Mike Rich, who is leaving the CRO post for personal reasons. Rich will remain with Zscaler as a strategic adviser through 31 December 2026, providing a transitional handover period.

The appointment

Tackett brings more than 30 years of enterprise technology sales experience to the role. Before joining Zscaler, he spent over a decade in senior sales leadership at ServiceNow and more than 16 years in equivalent positions at Dell, giving him a track record across large-scale, multinational go-to-market organisations.

Jay Chaudhry, Zscaler's chief executive, chairman and founder, said Tackett had demonstrated "operational discipline, global scale, and customer-first leadership" during his tenure leading worldwide sales. "His deep domain expertise and international experience throughout his career makes him the ideal leader to guide our global sales organization as enterprises urgently modernize their infrastructure with the Zero Trust Exchange and defend against AI-driven threats," Chaudhry said.

Tackett described the current market dynamic as one in which enterprises are actively decommissioning legacy firewall and VPN-based architectures in favour of zero-trust approaches, a shift he argued positions Zscaler well. Zscaler's Zero Trust Exchange platform is distributed across more than 200 public data centres globally and a large number of private edge sites, operating as a SASE-based inline cloud security layer.

Market context

The executive change lands at a competitive moment for Zscaler. The zero-trust network access market has broadened considerably over the past three years, with Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, Netskope and CrowdStrike all offering competing SASE and zero-trust posture products. Buyers evaluating platforms are increasingly weighing AI-powered threat detection capabilities alongside traditional network segmentation features, as adversaries deploy AI-assisted attack tooling at scale.

Revenue growth at pure-play cybersecurity vendors has faced scrutiny from investors in recent quarters, with several reporting elongated enterprise sales cycles and tighter procurement scrutiny, even as underlying demand for zero-trust architecture remains structurally strong. Tackett's prior experience scaling multi-billion-dollar go-to-market organisations is likely a deliberate signal to investors that Zscaler is prioritising commercial execution and international expansion at this stage of its growth.

From a regulatory standpoint, the NIS2 Directive, which came into force across EU member states in late 2024, has accelerated zero-trust adoption among European critical-infrastructure operators. DORA, applying to financial-services entities from January 2025, adds further compliance pressure that vendors like Zscaler can position their platforms against. Both frameworks create a degree of urgency for enterprise buyers that should benefit Zscaler's pipeline as Tackett takes the helm.

The next near-term milestone to watch will be Zscaler's next earnings call, where analysts are likely to press Chaudhry and Tackett on sales pipeline health, international revenue mix, and any impact from the leadership transition on customer retention.

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