TMCnet News

SmartBear Expands Leadership Team with New CMO, Product and Marketing Executives amid Strong Growth
[July 10, 2019]

SmartBear Expands Leadership Team with New CMO, Product and Marketing Executives amid Strong Growth


SmartBear, the innovator behind the industry's highest impact tools to build, test, and monitor great software, has strengthened its leadership team with several new additions, including Cynthia Gumbert as Chief Marketing Officer. Additionally, Emmanuel Paraskakis joins the company as Vice President of Product Management, Courtney Cunnane as Vice President of Demand Generation, and Safaa Khairalla as Vice President of Product Delivery & Operations.

"Strengthening our team allows us to keep expanding our product portfolio, build awareness, and meet growing global demand for our company's products," said Justin Teague, CEO of SmartBear. "Cynthia's experience in marketing leadership at some of the most successful fast growth startups as well as top technology brands makes her the ideal person to lead the marketing organization. Emmanuel, Courtney, and Safaa bring unparalleled talent in product strategic leadership, demand growth, and operations."

Gumbert brings more than 20 years of software and hardware experience, having held leadership positions at CA Technologies, Dell (News - Alert), and fast-growing technology startups. Most recently, she led the marketing organization at Quick Base. As a business executive dedicated to both brand growth and driving a quantitative approach for results, Gumbert has repeatedly supported double-digit and triple-digit growth at startups. She built the global demand center for Dell, overseeing a large-scale global rollout of a demand generation process and tools used by thousands of marketers. She has a bachelor's degree in engineering from MIT (News - Alert), a master's degree from Tufts University, and a maser's degree in business administration from Harvard Business School.



"I started my career as an engineer many years ago and gravitated toward tech industry marketing in order to combine creative problem-solving with data and analytics to bring new innovations to market," said Gumbert. "Everyone at SmartBear impresses with their creative drive and dedication to the open source communities we support, including Swagger, SoapUI, and the recent acquisition of Cucumber. The innovation here and deep understanding of how to help improve the efficiency of developers, test, and quality engineers is impressive. I am excited and honored to work alongside the team at SmartBear and its communities."

Most recently, Paraskakis led product management for API tooling at Apiary and Oracle (News - Alert) and has been delivering APIs as a product manager for the past 10 years. He is an advocate for the Design-First approach to building services and for using an API Definition throughout the API Lifecycle, to render clients and documentation, but also to configure API Management and automate monitoring and testing.


"I'm thrilled to be joining SmartBear," said Paraskakis. "I'm impressed with the breadth of API and testing products the company offers as well as the aggressive rollout of new products and acquisitions. I believe that APIs and Microservices make it easier for a wider range of developers to create new applications, as they can easily incorporate new functionality without having to create it from scratch every time. Thus, having great APIs and the ability to deliver them efficiently and accurately is essential for the future of software development."

Previously, Cunnane spent nine years at Experian and brings more than a decade of experience in demand and revenue generation and pipeline building, as well as a strong track record of partnering with Sales to scale new offerings and expand share of wallet with existing customers. This will be valuable for SmartBear as it manages a fast growing customer base, new demands for its tools, and stronger pipeline growth.

"I love that marketers get to craft a story and figure out how best to interact with our target customers throughout the buying process," said Cunnane. "SmartBear impresses me with its market engagement and wide array of products to support the DevOps lifecycle, and I see massive potential in this business. SmartBear has a strong demand generation foundation, and I'm excited to lead a team that scales to meet the needs of customers and the broader market."

Khairalla joins SmartBear from Carbon Black where she held leadership roles in corporate strategy as well as product and program management. She brings over a decade of global experience in building and strengthening strategic and technical delivery capabilities and in helping companies operationally scale during hyper growth periods.

"The tech industry's rapid growth makes continuous innovation, agile delivery, and effective operations a necessity," said Khairalla. "SmartBear has some of the best DevOps lifecycle products in the market in addition to its focus on open source, an aggressive acquisitions strategy, and some of the best in class talent. I am looking forward to working alongside the SmartBear team during this exciting time."

SmartBear is strengthening its team with additional internal promotions to VP roles in sales and services. The executive expansion is helping the company to keep pace with fast-moving requirements for software development tools - from performance and API testing, service virtualization, and code quality, to microservices and DevOps.

SmartBear is well known as a leader, innovator, and influencer in the market, recently recognized on the SD Times 100.

About SmartBear Software
SmartBear is behind the software that empowers developers, testers, and operations engineers at over 20,000 of the world's most innovative organizations including Adobe (News - Alert), JetBlue, MasterCard, and Microsoft. More than 6 million people use our tools to build, test, and monitor great software, faster. Our high-impact tools are easy to try, easy to buy, and easy to use. These tools are backed by a team of people passionate about helping you create software that transforms our world. Those tools are SmartBear tools. That team is SmartBear. For more information, visit: http://smartbear.com, or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.

All trademarks recognized.


[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]