Comings & Goings: Brocade Hires New CMO - The Appointment of Christine Heckart

This week, Brocade (News - Alert), a provider of high-performance network solutions that help organizations transition smoothly to a world where applications and information reside anywhere (i.e., in transforming data center networks with fabric-based solutions built for virtualization and the cloud to achieve their most critical business objectives), has announced the appointment of Christine Heckart to the position of Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).

As reported in a Yahoo! Finance post, Heckart has 20-plus years of experience in the high-tech field where she held marketing leadership positions at networking and other high tech companies, which makes this industry veteran the ideal addition to Brocade. Heckart left her ServiceSource appointment as CMO, which she held since July 2012. A year before she took on that position, in 2011, Lam Research Corporation, a major supplier of wafer fabrication equipment and services to the worldwide semiconductor industry, appointed her to its Board of Directors, a position she still holds today.

Her new role at Brocade will be to lead the company's drive to position itself as the “Network Provider of Choice to the World's Data Centers.” She will “oversee Brocade's global marketing and branding to reinforce the company's #1 market share position in its core SAN segment, drive new revenues, and increase the company’s status as a leading network provider for data centers worldwide,” said Lloyd Carney, CEO at Brocade. He believes Heckart is capable to drive the next wave of data center innovation, thanks to her extensive high-tech, data-networking marketing background that proves she can be a valuable asset to the business.

Heckart declared that, “it is an exciting time to join the company” and be a part of its differentiated solutions; she believes her CMO role is well positioned “to generate brand awareness and to develop and execute demand generation programs across the globe [that will] support business strategy for growth,” as told in the post.

As a new member of the Brocade team, she will assume responsibility for all strategies related to the Brocade's global marketing organization. She will oversee the promotion of next-generation solutions geared towards making Brocade a leader in the industry of data center fabrics. She will also drive market penetration in the emerging Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) markets, as the Yahoo! post conveyed. According to Heckart, such technologies will help propel Brocade forward in the global marketplace.