Vice President for leading IT-security Company with Strong Ties to his Swedish heritage, Lars Nilsson.
Lars Nilsson, Vice President of Field Operations for ArcSight has strong ties to his Swedish heritage. “I was born in Los Angeles, to Gunnar and Agneta Nilsson. Some may recognize these two names as “Mr. SAS” and “Moder SVEA”. Gunnar Nilsson was Station Manager for SAS at LAX for 40+ years and Agneta was the founder of SWEA, The Swedish Women Education Association.
“My father worked for SAS in Los Angeles which made it easy to fly back to Sweden where my brother and I spent most of our summers - at our home in Grödinge just outside of Stockholm. Some of my best childhood memories are from my summers in Sweden, sailing in the Archipelago and staying with relatives on Applarö,” Mr. Nilsson says.
Lars Nilsson’s background within the IT-business arena began after graduating from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a bachelors degree in business economics. Beginning his career at Xerox Corp, Lars later moved to San Francisco as a sales representative with the Swedish Company Nobel Biocare. In 1997 when the dot com boom hit Silicon Valley, Lars made his move into high-tech at Portal Software. "I took a job with Portal Software in the mid 90’s, and by the end of the 90’s Portal Software had become one of the most successful IPO's in the valley. It was an exciting time to be in the high-technology space.”
After a few stops along the way at different start-ups, Lars has finally settled at ArcSight. ArcSight is a leading provider of highly scalable security and compliance management solutions, with their headquarters in Cupertino, California. The company was founded in 2000 and went public on February 14, 2007. Over those 7 years ArcSight grew substantially larger. Today, with over 500 customers and worldwide representation across a diverse set of vertical markets, ArcSight handles security management for companies and authorities such as Wal-Mart, Lehman Brothers, U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, Unisys, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Xerox, Commerzbank, The Swedish Police, and Swisscom Mobile. Over the years ArcSight and products created by ArcSight have received several awards and recognitions such as the Security Magazine 2007 Reader’s Choice Awards, to name one.
ArcSight’s flagship product is the ArcSight ESM (Enterprise Security Management solution) which enables customers to manage information risk and protect critical IT assets. Companies use ArcSight ESM to discover the most critical threats to their organization and to manage and report on regulatory compliance. Security event information is efficiently collected from security devices and other critical IT systems, and then correlated across these various products to identify threats.
“You may not realize that most companies generate millions of log events every day. Every time a customer or employee signs in to an application, signs out, swipes their badge, prints a file, etc., it generates event records that are logged in different places. ArcSight collects these millions of little event records, analyzes them to detect potential security or operating problems, and then notifies the right people quickly, so that small issues are fixed before they become big problems. We do this at some of the largest organizations in the world today.”
And when he is not working, Lars dreams of taking his family back to the family summer home in Kivik for Midsummer. “My Swedish heritage is very important to me,” he says. “It will be fantastic to share the joys of Midsummer with my kids. There is really not a more special place on earth.” Lars currently resides in Alameda with his wife and two children.
