Chef Appoints Company’s First Chief Marketing Officer to Drive Continued Growth [feedly]

Chef Appoints Company's First Chief Marketing Officer to Drive Continued Growth
https://blog.chef.io/2016/11/10/chef-appoints-companys-first-chief-marketing-officer/

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Chef Promotes Ken Cheney to Lead Global Go-to-Market Strategy at Key Inflection Point for Company

Chef Bolsters Executive Team with New Product Engineering and Revenue Marketing Leaders

SEATTLE – November 10, 2016 – Chef, the leader in automation for DevOps, today appointed Ken Cheney as the company's first Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Cheney will lead Chef's global marketing strategies including brand, product marketing, corporate communications and go-to-market execution. Cheney has spent three years on Chef's leadership team as the company's vice president of business development and product marketing, most recently overseeing the product launches of Chef's flagship product, Chef Automate, Habitat, an open source product for application automation, and InSpec, an open source product for encoding compliance policy. He brings more than 20 years of experience in marketing open source and enterprise software technology to Chef, which is experiencing continued expansion of both its commercial and open source platforms. Chef is now used by over half of the companies on the Fortune 50 and recently crossed 40 million downloads.

Chef also today announced two new executive appointments that bolster its product and marketing teams. Marc Holmes joins Chef as vice president of revenue marketing to drive the company's new customer acquisition and sales enablement programs. Holmes was most recently head of growth marketing at pioneering container management company Docker. Shanku Niyogi joins Chef as senior director of product engineering to lead the development of Chef's products. Prior to Chef, Niyogi served as product and engineering leader for Microsoft's Visual Studio.

Cheney will report to Chef CEO Barry Crist, Holmes will report to Cheney, and Niyogi will report to Chef's Chief Technology Officer Adam Jacob.

"Chef's market opportunity continues to expand as software becomes a key driver of innovation across every industry. Chef is positioned to be the foundation of every organization's software delivery workflow," said Crist. "Ken has a deep understanding of our customers' need for automation, scale, and market agility with the long-term vision to expand our awareness in the enterprise. Meanwhile, the additions of Marc and Shanku strengthen our revenue and product disciplines to best position us for success in 2017."

Chef Fortifies Marketing and Product Excellence

Cheney has more than 20 years of IT industry experience spanning marketing, product, business development, corporate development, and sales in both early-stage and mature businesses. During his three years at Chef, Cheney built go-to-market partnerships with AWS, HPE, Google and Microsoft, opening up multi-million dollar revenue streams for Chef's business. He also identified and led Chef's two acquisitions — Tower3 in 2014 and VulcanoSec in 2015 –– expanding the company's product portfolio to include analytics and compliance respectively. Prior to Chef, Cheney held executive positions at multi-channel messaging startup Message Bus, open source storage software provider Likewise, and HP Software.

"Chef has a large and dedicated open source community as well as a strong brand built on the capabilities we provide leading organizations such as Intuit, Gannett, and Microsoft in their pursuits to be software-driven businesses," commented Cheney. "The opportunity is to take the successful patterns of high-velocity software organizations using Chef and apply them to the mainstream enterprise."

Holmes' more than 15-year career in IT includes a diverse range of experiences building, managing, evangelizing, and marketing open source, developer platforms, and enterprise software. Before joining Chef, Holmes led Docker's growth efforts across SaaS and enterprise businesses. Prior to Docker, Holmes served as Hortonworks' vice president of revenue marketing, helping take the big data leader through substantial early growth to an initial public offering in two years. Earlier in his career, Holmes spent nearly a decade in product marketing and evangelism roles at Microsoft.

Niyogi has spent nearly 20 years building and leading enterprise software development teams. Prior to Chef, Niyogi spent more than a decade in various engineering and product leadership roles at Microsoft. While there, Niyogi led the creation of Visual Studio Code, Microsoft's first cross-platform development tool, growing it to more than 2.4 million downloads, 600,000-plus monthly users and nearly 15,000 "stars" on GitHub in its first year of release.

 

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