On Monday I welcomed Karen Gardner to Cloudsmith as our new Chief Marketing Officer! This is an important milestone for our customers, our partners, our company, and our industry.
Karen has made her mark as a marketing leader, most notably as CMO at Sonatype, one of the pioneers in artifact management. She played a key role in establishing Sonatype as a strong brand and a high-growth company, including scaling up Sonatype in building a truly multi-channel go-to-market sourcing machine. We still see Sonatype today as a credible source of perspective in our industry, notably via their excellent annual State of the Software Supply Chain report.
Karen now brings this perspective to Cloudsmith, in support of our vision to be the world’s software supply chain. We’re pursuing a different strategy than Sonatype, particularly through our commitment to cloud-native SaaS architecture and our focus on all aspects of the software supply chain, including developer-native distribution. But we walk in Sonatype’s footsteps, and I respect the impact Sonatype has had in validating the critical need for enterprise-class artifact management. Karen is the perfect leader to help Cloudsmith expand what a software supply chain platform can do to make development teams more efficient, more reliable, and more secure.
To our customers, with Karen onboard you can expect to see Cloudsmith expand our go-to-market efforts across marketing and sales to pursue more enterprise wins. Cloudsmith works well for software teams of any size, including startups, but we’re really built for the most complex development environments—think hundreds or thousands of developers, working across business units using a myriad of different formats, and requiring appropriate controls over software provenance and security as packages, containers, and images make their way from public sources into production deployments.
To our partners, you’ll see a more open Cloudsmith, working closely with best-in-breed offerings across security scanning, build and deploy CI/CD tools, and identity management. We believe our customers are best served by vendors who are willing to partner with each other to support a unified, seamless solution.
To our industry peers across the software supply chain, know that Cloudsmith is here to play a collaborative and open role in supporting emerging standards like SLSA and S2C2F, and in interoperability that makes the lives of software developers a little bit easier.
And Cloudsmithers, well, we’ve been waiting a while to find the right CMO for us, and we’ve found her in Karen. She brings just the right mix of marketing expertise and industry experience to take Cloudsmith to the next level. I’m delighted to welcome her to the team.
Welcome aboard Karen—I’m looking forward to working with you to build great marketing programs that serve our customers and our wider market! You can reach out to Karen at cmo@cloudsmith.com.
