Stellar Cyber announced the appointment of Mayuresh Ektare as Senior Vice President of Product Management, bringing more than 20 years of experience building category-defining AI-native cybersecurity platforms to help address what many see as the industry’s next critical failure point: the Security Operations Center (SOC).
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Ektare joins Stellar Cyber from Qualys, where he led the shift from vulnerability management to an Exposure & Risk platform powered by Agentic AI. Previously, he served as SVP at Brinqa, helping define the Risk Operations category, and was a founding member of Zingbox, an IoT security company acquired by Palo Alto Networks. He has also held leadership roles at Aerohive Networks and Trend Micro.
“The SOC is fundamentally broken,” said Ektare. “We’ve spent years improving detection and visibility, but we’ve ignored the fact that humans can’t keep up with machine-speed AI-driven attacks. That gap is where breaches happen.”
Ektare points to alert overload and fragmented tooling as systemic issues.
“Security teams are drowning in alerts from EDR, NDR and dozens of other tools — all operating in silos,” he said. “The industry keeps adding more detection, but more signals without context just create more noise. That model doesn’t scale.”
The answer isn’t incremental improvement — but a structural shift.
“The traditional SOC model — alerts, analysts, tickets, response — is collapsing,” Ektare said. “You can’t hire your way out of this problem. The only viable path forward is a human-augmented autonomous SOC, where AI handles correlation, triage, and early response in real time.”
Stellar Cyber’s platform unifies multiple capabilities with AI-native processes into a single operational layer — cutting through fragmentation and automating detection, investigation, triage, and response end to end.
“Most vendors are still selling tools. We’re building a platform,” said Changming Liu, CEO of Stellar Cyber. “Mayuresh understands that the problem isn’t a lack of tools — it’s a lack of operational coherence. His experience across many different security domains, including threat detection, exposure management, and risk operations, makes him exactly the kind of leader we need to drive the next phase of SecOps.”
For Ektare, the move reflects a broader industry inflection point.
“We solved for visibility. We made progress on risk,” he said. “But the SOC is where everything converges — and today, it’s the weakest link. The next wave of cybersecurity innovation will be defined by who can fix it, leveraging AI.”
He added that Stellar Cyber is uniquely positioned to lead that shift.
“What stood out to me is that Stellar Cyber isn’t asking customers to rip and replace,” Ektare said. “It unifies what they already have and turns it into something operationally effective. That’s how you actually move the SOC forward — not with more tools, but with a better AI native autonomous platform.”
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