Tech Industry Marketing Veteran Will Lead Virtana Through Accelerated Momentum and Growth Into the Hybrid Cloud Market

Virtana today announced that Christina Richards has been appointed as Chief Marketing Officer. Richards will be responsible for leading global marketing and will report directly to Kash Shaikh, President and CEO of Virtana.

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The announcement follows news of the recently appointed VP of Product Management and Senior Vice President of Customer Success, as well as the company’s product announcement of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based Virtana Platform—the first unified observability platform for migrating, optimizing, monitoring, and managing application workloads with flexible consumption across public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

A Women of Influence, as awarded by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, Richards brings more than 20 years of full-spectrum marketing, business operations, and engineering experience in technology sectors including SaaS and IoT applications. For the past four years, Richards served as Vice President of Global Marketing at Aeris Communications, a connected vehicle SaaS applications provider. In that role, she led efforts to increase B2B demand generation by 10X in her first year, yielding 23% revenue growth. She helped quadruple the customer base for its e-commerce business; launched Aeris’ first account-based marketing (ABM) program for SaaS product.

Kash Shaikh, President and CEO of Virtana said, “I met Christina a few years ago and was impressed by her focus on customers and understanding of the business. It was clear that her hands-on, deep technology experience and vision to create simple yet powerful communications were a unique combination. There are very few tech marketing executives with a clear understanding of technology. As a result, she truly understands how to create clear and compelling messages to help drive success for customers, partners, and all team members.”

Shaikh added, “Virtana is seeing impressive growth this year and we look forward to our Global 2000 customers and channel partners benefitting from that momentum and the clear, powerful marketing programs that will be created and executed by Christina and team. Christina’s e-commerce experience will also be an asset as we deliver self-service product-led SaaS capabilities with Virtana Platform.”

Said Christina Richards, “Virtana is sitting on a wealth of opportunity for customers, partners, and team members. We are in a unique position to lead the Global 2000 in migrating, optimizing, monitoring, and managing application workloads across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. While cloud migration has been accelerated by the pandemic, it is still in its infancy. In looking at the Virtana Platform, I am certain we will continue to successfully guide companies on their cloud journey, leading them with data-driven insights. Specifically, enterprises want reassurance that what is working in their current cloud configurations will not be disturbed in the quest for cloud optimization.”

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Richards further noted, “There are many parallel issues in cloud migration that I have experienced before in other technology transitions. Hybrid IT issues and the surrounding technology are complex – we need to connect the dots for our customers in a way that is relevant for them and also can be absorbed by partners and analysts.  At Virtana, we have a deep, strong value proposition – we need to make sure it is simple and clear so it resonates easily with all our constituencies.  At the same time, we are responsible for leading clear communication for our industry, to grow the market share to meet a tremendous opportunity. The trend data shows our space is just getting started.”

This trend was recently confirmed by IDC 2020 research, which showed that less than 20% of applications have migrated to a public cloud to date. Cloud predictions are showing that by 2022, over 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs.

Shaikh noted, “I agree that both the space and our proactive movement into it are ripe for growth, and our hard work has already started to pay off. Virtana was recently honored as one of CRN’s coolest cloud companies, a Silicon Review leading company of 2021, and a top 10 player keeping public cloud costs under control by Business Insider.” 

Richards has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech University and an MBA from Southern Methodist University. Beyond work and technology, she is a member of Hipower, a tribe of women leaders laser-focused on accelerating one another’s success, and a volunteer with the Junior League of San Jose, providing education and support for transitional foster youth as they move into adulthood.

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