Virtana 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.
The appointment follows news of the company’s product announcement of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) based Virtana Platform – a 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, she 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 10 times in her first year, yielding 23 percent revenue growth. She helped quadruple the customer base for its e-commerce business; launched Aeris’ first account-based marketing (ABM) program for SaaS products.
Shaikh 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.”
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.
