Julia White - VP & CMO, AWS
Julia White spent nearly 20 years at Microsoft. She started in product management in the server division in 2001, ran reseller channel marketing and rebates for the US subsidiary, then took over product marketing for Exchange Server and Exchange Online. Technical marketing for the Office division followed, covering Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, and the developer and IT pro audiences. As corporate vice president she led product marketing for Azure, developer tools, and servers. SAP then made her chief marketing and solutions officer and a member of its executive board, a job spanning product and industry marketing, digital and brand, regional marketing, corporate communications, solution management, and government affairs. AWS hired her as vice president and CMO in November 2024, where she leads global marketing across brand, demand, and product, plus developer experience, executive engagement, and analyst relations. White started her career in product management at Intuit in 1996.
Takeshi Numoto - EVP & CMO, Microsoft
Before any of the marketing, Takeshi Numoto was a trade negotiator. He spent two and a half years in the international trade policy bureau of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry in Tokyo. Microsoft hired him in 1997, and he has been there 29 years. His first seven were in Windows program management and Office marketing. He then spent seven years as corporate vice president for Office 365 marketing, helping move the Office business from packaged on-premises software to a cloud subscription model, followed by eight years leading cloud marketing for Azure, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform. Commercial CMO came in 2020. Since October 2023 he has been executive vice president and chief marketing officer, running global marketing across the entire portfolio, including product marketing, advertising, market research, events, and communications. Numoto also served two years on the board of New Relic.
Bridget Perry - CMO, Amperity
Enterprise marketing at Adobe grew from $300 million to more than $3 billion while Bridget Perry ran it. She led that business globally for five years at better than 20% annual growth, building the company's enterprise marketing function along the way, then moved to London as CMO for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. That job covered consumer, small business, and enterprise for a SaaS business above $2.5 billion, with a $120 million budget and an organization of more than 150 people. Nearly nine years at Microsoft came before Adobe. Contentful then hired her as CMO to build brand, communications, events, product marketing, growth, and partner and developer marketing for a product-led business growing more than 70% a year. She also served as interim CMO at Later, integrating the go-to-market organizations of two recently merged businesses. Amperity named her CMO in March 2026. Perry has served on nonprofit boards for more than 20 years, including Solid Ground, Literacy Source, and the Alliance for Education.
Amy Payne - CMO, Nintex
Amy Payne has worked in agencies, in corporate marketing, as a consultant, inside global companies, and at startups. That range shows in how she describes the job, which is building sales and marketing partnerships tight enough that everyone wins from the same plan. Dassault Systèmes gave her nearly eight years, where she ran channel marketing for North America, a region producing roughly 30% of worldwide revenue, and rebuilt the partner co-marketing program around the partners actually contributing to the business. Talkdesk hired her as vice president of marketing for the Americas in 2020, working alongside sales across the US, Canada, and Latin America, and her remit widened over six years to global customer, partner, regional, and digital marketing. She has been CMO of Nintex since September 2026. Payne was named to the Top 100 in customer marketing and advocacy and to CRN's Women of the Channel.
Robson Grieve - CMO, Smartsheet
Seven consecutive CMO jobs sit on Robson Grieve's record. Concur Technologies started it in 2012, where he was EVP of worldwide marketing in Redmond. Citrix followed, then New Relic for three years, then Pure Storage, then OutSystems, then Motive for three and a half years. Smartsheet hired him as CMO in March 2026. What makes the run unusual is what came before it. Grieve spent more than five years as president of Creature, the Seattle advertising agency, and four years as marketing director at Corbis, the image licensing company. Agency leadership is a different discipline from enterprise software marketing, and few people in this field have run both sides at that level.
Holly Simmons - CMO, Outreach
An engineering degree from Purdue is where Holly Simmons started. She has since held senior marketing and product management roles at Oracle, ServiceNow, and SAP, selling to service, IT, sales, marketing, HR, operations, and supply chain buyers. SAP kept her nearly a decade across four entities, including business intelligence marketing at BusinessObjects and global marketing for SuccessFactors, both acquired by SAP, and later a global VP role covering supply chain audiences, developers, and emerging topics such as the Internet of Things. ServiceNow then made her global head of product marketing for customer service management for four years, and Oracle hired her as global VP of product strategy for marketing, commerce, content management, and its Unity customer data platform. Outreach named her CMO in December 2024. Simmons has worked at four startups, run her own consulting business, and spent time at Apple and the media company Knight Ridder. She is a published author on enterprise architecture and CIO best practices, and holds an MBA from Thunderbird.
Ravi Kandikonda - SVP, Zillow
Ravi Kandikonda is chief marketing officer for all Zillow Group brands, including Zillow, Trulia, StreetEasy, and Zillow B2B, and general manager of a $300 million advertising business. Credit cards came first. He spent three years at HSBC Card Services in Monterey running marketing and retention, then consulted at FICO. Ogilvy made him a managing director for four years across New York and Asia Pacific. Comcast NBCUniversal then kept him more than eight years, where he rose from VP of marketing to VP of marketing strategy, technology, and operations, and finally to SVP of marketing in Philadelphia. Zillow hired him in 2020 and promoted him to lead all Zillow Group marketing within weeks. His team now spans product, engineering, operations, marketing, technology, P&L management, and sales. Kandikonda argues that the best brands fuse product, marketing, engineering, and design, and his job description is unusual proof that he means it.
Allan Samson - EVP & CMO, T-Mobile
Cable and telecom have shaped Allan Samson's entire career. At Charter Communications he directed consumer and small business marketing with a $370 million budget, a staff of 150, and seven outsourced call centers running more than 1,000 seats, overseeing four sales channels that drove 40% of the business. Before that he was chief sales and marketing officer at Birch Communications, leading sales, marketing, and product development for a voice, data, cloud, and IT provider. T-Mobile hired him in 2016 as senior vice president of marketing in Overland Park, responsible for pricing, packaging, promotions, and go-to-market across every sales channel. Two more roles followed, CMO of the business group and then chief broadband officer. In March 2026 he became executive vice president and chief marketing officer, leading marketing for all consumer brands including T-Mobile, Metro by T-Mobile, and Mint Mobile, with performance and commercial marketing, media, and pricing in his remit.
Gene Foca - Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer, Getty Images
Gene Foca now owns revenue, not just marketing. His Getty Images remit covers digital performance marketing, brand and communications, e-commerce, marketing operations, global sales, customer success, and customer care. He arrived in 2017 as CMO and moved into the combined role in May 2023. Amazon shaped the years before. He served as co-general manager of Kindle and Amazon Newsstands in Seattle, responsible for North American content acquisition and marketing, then became chief marketing officer of Quidsi, the Amazon subsidiary covering pet, baby, toy, apparel, and health and beauty categories, where he oversaw the entire corporate marketing budget across ten consumer brands. A year at FreshDirect running customer and digital marketing for the online grocer came in between. Foca has done this work in publicly traded, private equity-backed, and founder-led companies, usually during transformation or repositioning.
Paul Stoddart - CMO, PitchBook
Paul Stoddart rebranded Epicor and rebuilt its website, lifting lead generation 36%, form completions 11%, and global brand awareness fourfold year over year. He was CMO and SVP there, owning field and product marketing, brand, PR, analyst relations, operations, and inside sales. Salesforce then hired him as CMO for its customer and partner success portfolio, driving awareness, demand generation, and annual contract value growth. He also spent a year advising TomTom's board on marketing leadership and organizational transformation. PitchBook named him CMO in September 2023. There he has led a brand refresh for the private capital markets data company, revamped full-funnel revenue marketing, and built a digital practice focused on generative engine optimization and AI optimization. Stoddart describes himself as a full-stack marketer, and the span of his background, from business development and product management through brand and inside sales, supports the claim.
The Microsoft Effect, and Its Limits
Three of these ten spent formative years in Redmond, and one never left. That lineage explains part of what Greater Seattle's marketing bench looks like: patient, technical, comfortable with long product cycles and enterprise buyers who ask hard questions. But the more interesting careers here came in from somewhere else. An agency president, a trade negotiator, a credit card retention manager, an engineer with a Purdue degree. Cloud and data companies need people who can hold a technical conversation, and this city produces plenty of them. What sharpens the work is the ones who learned the craft in a different building entirely.