Sumo Logic Vet Hits 'Job Lottery' with Role at Sonar

Longtime channel vet Lynne Doherty, most recently with Sumo Logic, is joining Sonar as its president of field operations.

In her new role, Doherty will be responsible for driving revenue, and ensuring that Sonar's customers are successful in their pursuit of clean code. She will lead the company’s demand generation, global sales, solutions engineering, customer success and customer support teams globally.

Doherty most recently was president of worldwide field operations at Sumo Logic. There, she led Sumo Logic’s worldwide sales, sales engineers, partner and customer success teams.

Sonar's Lynne Doherty

Before that, she held various leadership roles at McAfee, where she drove more than $1 billion in revenue annually.

Before joining McAfee, Doherty held various sales and marketing leadership roles at Cisco, where she oversaw a team of more than 2,000 employees, and drove billions in annual revenue.

'Full-Circle Moment' for Sumo Logic Vet

Doherty said she feels like she “hit the job lottery.”

“Sonar is the leading provider of clean code solutions,” she said. “That means we help our customers accelerate mission-critical software development, reduce technical debt, and improve code quality and security. As I look back to my first job as a programmer at Verizon, landing at Sonar is a full-circle moment for me to get back to those developer roots and lead a team designed to put this software in the hands of people around the world who code. The market, the foundation that’s been built, and the team we have today are all reasons that made me excited to join Sonar. As we work to grow the business, partnerships and alliances fall under my scope, and will be a focus area for me as we will look to build out a team to do much more there. We have a lot that can be done in this realm and I look forward to leaning into partners to help get Sonar’s powerful capabilities out there.”

Doherty said her focus as a global sales leader has been about creating competitive teams who like to win, and have the processes in place to run a predictable and growing business, with the discipline needed to “flawlessly execute against our priorities.”

“The same rigor and structure will go into what I look to build on at Sonar as we focus on growing our sales team around the world,” she said. “As I get ramped up at Sonar, my goal is to learn the business, learn the team and prepare to execute. We have a solid core at Sonar, meaning the product and millions of developers around the world who use it today is a great starting point for me coming in to drive revenue. That said, it’s going to be about how we build, scale and put the fundamentals in place we need to become a go-to-market machine.”

Sonar Has Big Goals Ahead

Sonar has big goals ahead on its journey to $1 billion in revenue, and “to help us achieve those goals, we need to build out our sales team around the world,” Doherty said.

Sonar will hire for functions across the company and has many open opportunities right now.

“Sonar is a unique company in that much of their growth thus far − 400,000 enterprise customers around the world and 7 million developers who use the software − has been organic,” she said. “To have such a solid customer base and community exist with a small sales team and very few partners to support is a great position to be in. We have a lot of opportunity ahead with more sales resources focused on serving and educating open source customers, reaching those who don’t yet know us, and expanding in new ways with existing customers. That said, it will be a good challenge to build the team to do this and scale it effectively.”