Splunk has promoted three executives into its executive c-suite. The updates include:
- Carrie Palin will be senior vice president and chief marketing officer;
- John Sabino, currently senior vice president, customer success, has been promoted to chief customer officer; and
- Christian Smith, currently senior vice president, global sales, has been promoted to chief revenue officer.
Given their titles and responsibilities, the trio plays key roles in how Splunk promotes, sells and supports its data platform to security, IT and DevOps partners worldwide.
Splunk Executive Promotions: More Details
Palin has served as senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Splunk since February 2019. Prior to Splunk, she was CMO of SendGrid and Box, and held a number of leadership roles at IBM and Dell. She currently serves as a member of the board of directors at EnterpriseDB.
John Sabino joined Splunk in January 2017 as senior vice president, Customer Success, responsible for over 1,500 employees. His experience includes cloud business transformation, scaling company operations, customer success, digital strategy, sales and IoT. He previously held key posts at General Electric and NBC Universal, and was previously a captain in the United States Army.
Christian Smith joined Splunk in 2017 as vice president America sales, and has served as senior vice president, global sales since June 2019. He specializes in cloud and hybrid go-to-market strategy and brings over 25 years of expertise in cloud, SaaS sales and marketing, scaling sales organizations and acquisition integration. He previously served as chief revenue officer at Nintex and held leadership roles at Oracle, ATG and Daptiv.
COVID-19 Drives Demand for Splunk Software
Palin, Sabino and Smith all will report directly to Splunk President and CEO Doug Merritt.
The promotions come after Splunk reported strong Q2 revenue results; in the company’s August fiscal 2021 second quarter earnings call, Merritt reported that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased demand for the company’s machine data management software, with cloud-based software products driving more than 50 percent of software sales deals. The company’s annual recurring revenue is approaching $2 Billion, Merritt said on the call.
“The success of our customers is, and always has been, our number one priority,” said Merritt. “Since joining Splunk almost four years ago, both Christian and John have transformed our sales and customer success programs in lock-step with the tremendous growth of our cloud business. Alongside Carrie, this team will build upon our strong execution and continued momentum. I have never been more excited about Splunk’s people, product innovation and future.”
In addition to the promotions, Splunk announced that Susan St. Ledger, who joined Splunk in 2016 and served as president, worldwide field operations since October 2017, is leaving Splunk to accept “a leadership position at another technology organization,” a Splunk partner, according to the statement.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) software provider Okta has hired St. Ledger, that company has confirmed.
