- What career experiences have best prepared you to lead ZEDEDA’s marketing efforts in an evolving edge computing landscape?
Many of my career experiences have prepared me for the role at ZEDEDA. Looking back, almost everything I’ve done plays a part. My first job out of college was in equity research, where I worked on a white paper about data center consolidation and the road to cloud computing back in early 2008. That’s been playing out for over 15 years, powered by virtualization and the early beginnings of API-centric computing.
From there, I moved into product marketing at Riverbed, where we addressed the challenge of distance and latency as people were centralizing and consolidating into data centers and the cloud (among other things). Then, at Pivotal, we helped organizations learn how to build software in a cloud-native way. This was about moving up the stack and thinking differently about software architecture, especially around resiliency. We advocated to embrace the fact that things will inevitably break and design around that, particularly in the cloud, where compute resources are abundant and automatable.
But what if you can’t run your software in the cloud? Despite all the cloud innovation, many distributed environments have been left behind, running old, vulnerable stacks. That’s where ZEDEDA comes in. We’re looking at the problem of how to deliver high-quality software faster and more frequently to locations where you have no humans, where the network is unreliable, such as at a farm or on an oil rig. It’s about factoring in the realities of those environments and building for speed and resiliency from there.
My experiences at PagerDuty also showed me the growing need for edge computing. We saw retailers struggling to manage the increasing technology in their stores, driven by things like buying online and picking up in-store, self check-out, and omni-channel fulfillment. It’s clear that many businesses, from retail and hospitality to manufacturing and energy, operate in distributed locations, and they need a way to drive innovation through software in those places.
So, my background in cloud computing, software development, resiliency, and edge computing, along with my understanding of the challenges faced by enterprises, has given me a unique perspective that’s essential for leading ZEDEDA’s marketing efforts in this evolving landscape.
- ZEDEDA is at the forefront of a rapidly changing market. How do you see your role shaping the narrative around edge computing and ZEDEDA’s place in it?
I’m a storyteller. When people do amazing things, that’s a story that should be told, and I can help with that. When a customer solves interesting and difficult challenges, that’s a story I want to help tell. By hearing that story, others can learn from it and start to picture how their own business could benefit.
My role is to help companies understand and realize that type of innovation. It’s about connecting with the “why” and then helping them understand the “how.” Some of that involves solving technical problems with our products, but it’s also about navigating the change – the social and management aspects.
The technology part is often the easy part. What’s harder is figuring out how to get people excited about doing something different. That means understanding the business case, the opportunity for improvement, and making it easy for people to see the value.
I’m most excited about how ZEDEDA can help more companies succeed with bringing software innovation to their edge environments. I can’t wait to hear more about what our customers are doing and help them tell their stories.
- What attracted you to ZEDEDA? What aspects of the company’s mission and technology resonate with you most
What attracted me to ZEDEDA was seeing how the company started by solving those foundational issues at the edge. From a security perspective, they were thoughtful all the way down to the kernel, contributing to the Linux Foundation with EVE. This is a really intentional approach to the realities of edge computing. You need something lightweight and inherently secure, especially when someone could physically walk away with a device or tamper with it.
ZEDEDA also recognized the challenge of managing environments without reliable connectivity. That has to be built in from the ground level, always assuming that a node could be unavailable. And they’ve addressed the need to do this at scale.
These things—the security aspects, the connectivity sensitivity, the scale considerations—are really important to address at the foundation and not as an afterthought. Many higher layers of abstraction are built on assumptions, and when you challenge those assumptions, like unreliable connectivity, you have to revisit your abstractions. ZEDEDA impressed me by tackling these foundational issues head-on.
- How do you plan to engage with ZEDEDA’s current customers and cultivate deeper relationships with them?
One of the things I’ve seen work really well is bringing customers together to accelerate their learning. We can work with customers individually, but things get really exciting when you build a community where they’re sharing with each other. It’s not just about the technology; it’s about the sociotechnical dynamics and other concerns that become shared learnings.
I’ve been fortunate to build these types of communities in the past. I’m merely the facilitator, but I learn a ton when I get to facilitate customers sharing and learning from each other. My goal is to build those types of communities where everyone gets to learn faster and succeed more.
While online forums have their place, I find that bringing people together live—whether virtual or in-person—is really important. They build relationships and learn from their peer group. There’s a richer texture to what they’re sharing. Live settings allow for deeper questions and more meaningful learning.
- Where do you see the edge computing industry heading in the next 3-5 years, and how can ZEDEDA, through its marketing efforts, play a leading role in shaping that future?
I see edge computing as a transformation of computing at the edge. It’s already happening, but it’s often not pretty. Looking ahead, the tremendous interest in AI raises an interesting question. If you have a lot of data being generated outside the data center, where do you run the AI? How much data needs to move back and forth?
This will force a rethinking of how we do computing at the edge. Many AI solutions assume you’ve already figured out DevOps. DevOps is table stakes to move quickly and inject AI capabilities into software. If you can’t iterate and move quickly at the edge, you’re not going to be able to take advantage of AI at the edge. It’d be like driving a Ferrari on an ancient Roman road. There’s a mismatch between the level of iteration needed and the security that must be factored in. There’s an impetus to think about AI at the edge, but many companies need to solve more foundational challenges first. A wave of modernization needs to happen. Sometimes it takes a threat to catalyze change. Will the opportunity of AI be enough to drive change, or will it create new business threats that force companies to rethink what they’re doing?
To help shape this future, ZEDEDA’s marketing efforts can tell inspiring stories, but also highlight the very real security threats. We need to reach edge and IoT architects, but also CISOs who need our solutions in their toolbox.
- What is one key message you want external stakeholders (customers, partners, investors) to take away from your marketing leadership plans for ZEDEDA?
Start imagining the software you could be building for your edge environments. There is so much untapped innovation at the edge. It takes bold thinking to challenge the status quo, but those that do will see the payoff with faster data analysis, factory optimization, predictive maintenance, you name it. I’m here for it!
I truly believe that ZEDEDA will enable some of the most satisfying work of transforming businesses that operate at the edge. Start learning and imagining today.
