International Women’s Day: Meet Ladies Who Lead in the Channel
#EmbraceEquity, accelerate equality and celebrate the exceptional.
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Jameeka Green Aaron, CISO at authentication services provider Okta, is responsible for the holistic security and compliance of the company’s Auth0 Identity Platform, products and corporate environment.
Aaron stepped into the role in 2021, bringing with her more than 20 years of industry experience. A recognized industry thought leader, she previously worked at managing and improving information security systems for employers including Nike, Hurley, Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Navy. She is also committed to advancing women and people of color in STEM fields and participated in the U.S. State Department’s TechWomen program and the National Urban League of Young Professionals.
Kim Anstett, CIO of cybersecurity company Trellix , is responsible for executing a technology strategy designed to drive efficiency, flexibility and innovation across the business. Pior to Trellix she served as CIO for Iron Mountain and CIO for Nielsen.
Anstett has extensive experience in development and deployment of global products, enterprise platforms, data analytics, digital transformation and cybersecurity. A graduate of Tufts University, she is passionate about professional and community engagement, specifically in developing diverse technology.
As CIO at Okta, Alvina Antar leads the company’s Business Technology organization. She works to ensure a seamless experience for both customers and employees. Prior to joining Okta in 2020, Antar spent six years as the first-ever CIO at Zuora. While there, she helped the company grow from $30 million to $300 million and lead them through a successful IPO in 2018. Before that, she spent 17 years at Dell, helping them in their expansion from hardware to to an end-to-end software and solutions provider.
A graduate of the University of Houston with bachelor’s degree in computer science, Antar co-founded the Silicon Valley CIO Women’s Network, serves on the board of directors for Girls in Tech and BUILD, an entrepreneurship program for underserved high school students.
Joanna McDaniel Burkey is CISO for HP. She and her team are responsible for HP’s global cybersecurity program, including IT infrastructure, technology platforms and business units. They oversee governance, regulatory and compliance, operations, strategy and architecture as well as product security.
Burkey first joined HP in 2005 as a senior software engineer. After nearly 13 years, she moved to Siemens, eventually becoming their global head of cyber defense. She returned to HP again in 2020 as their CISO. With a bachelor’s degrees in computer science and mathematics, Burkey has focused on cybersecurity throughout her career.
Jane Connell has served as senior vice president and CIO of Verizon since 2021. She previously held the same position at State Street Bank. Before that, she spent nearly 28 years in supply chain operations at Johnson and Johnson, starting as the supply chain director and rising through the ranks to vice president and corporate CIO. While there she also led diversity and women’s leadership initiatives.
A graduate of Rutgers University, Connell served on the school’s leadership development and strategic partnerships (LDSP) advisory board.
Julie Davila has risen quickly through the ranks at Sophos. She joined the company in 2021 as senior director of application and infrastructure security and earlier this year was promoted to head field CTO and field CTO for the public sector. She is building the field CTO organization from scratch.
Davila has a solid background in building things from scratch. In 2020, she and a fellow military veteran founded ZibaSec, which helps organizations improve the resilience of their workforce against social engineering threats. A year later, the company achieved a Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Moderate Authority to Operate (ATO) for their flagship product, PhishTACO, a cloud-based phishing simulation platform. Davila serves as CEO of the company which is now an emerging leader in federal government IT security training.
Noopur Davis has been with Comcast since 2016 and currently serves as corporate executive vice president, CISO and chief product privacy officer. She joined Comcast from Intel, where she served as vice president, global quality, Intel ISecG. Before that she was Previously, she was a visiting scientist and senior member of technical staff at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute.
At Comcast Davis is responsible for overseeing the full range of cybersecurity and product privacy functions for all Comcast Cable businesses, including all products and services delivered to residential and business customers. Her responsibilities include product security and privacy, security and privacy controls, privacy engineering and operations, data protection, security architecture and engineering, security operations and incident response, threat hunting, security intelligence and analytics, identity management, technical fraud and the Legal Response Center.
A champion of women in technology, Davis serves on the advisory board of Comcast/NBCUniversal TechWomen. She is the recipient of the WICT/SCTE•ISBE/Cablefax Women in Technology and WeQual 2021 awards, and has been included on the Cablefax 100, Cablefax Diversity, Cablefax Most Powerful Women and Top Women in Technology lists multiple times. In 2022 she was selected as the Alumni of Achievement award winner for the College of Science at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Jae Sook Evans, CIO of Oracle, serves both internal- and external-facing customers. She’s responsible for accelerating Oracle IT’s cloud transformation across thousands of environments, and her team provides IT services to Oracle’s 170,000 employees and developers worldwide.
Evans has spent more than 20 years building and leading global technology teams that deliver world-class, highly available, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure and services. She came to Oracle in 2020 from Walmart Labs where she served as senior vice president, infrastructure engineering and operations.
Passionate about bringing diversity and inclusion to the workplace, Evans is the executive sponsor of DE&I for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and has served as a leader and champion in various industry organizations focused on DE&I.
When Jen Felch stepped into the role of chief digital office for Dell Technologies in 2019, she was the first person to hold the position. She had been with the company since 2010, starting out as an executive director. She also served as Dell’s senior manager of global operations from 2003 until 2009, before she briefly moved to Boeing.
Felch drives strategy, direction and delivery for Dell Digital, Dell’s IT organization. She is part of the company’s initiative to transform the traditional IT function and enable the adoption of digital technologies across Dell. They are also pursuing business transformation with their customers around the world. Felch’s role combines the traditional roles and responsibilities of a CIO, along with the emerging role of change agent for digital transformation. She also manages the “Dell Digital Way,” a simplified and innovative technological and cultural approach to quickly introducing new products and capabilities that provide Dell with a competitive edge.
DXC Technology named Kristie Grinnell senior vice president and CIO in 2021. She leads global IT strategy and operations, responsible for integrating and streamlining systems, implementing new digital capabilities to improve performance and efficiency, and ensuring the stability of DXC’s global IT infrastructure, all with the goal of enabling the company to provide superior service and innovation to its customers.
Grinnell joined DXC from General Dynamics Information Technology where she was global CIO and vice president for supply chain. She led the transformation enterprise IT strategic plan and IT Shared Services center for customers, along with supply chain management. Prior to that, she was director of planning and governance and director of client delivery enablement for Computer Sciences Corp., a predecessor of DXC Technology.
A strong supporter of academic STEM programs for young women, Grinnell is a recipient of the 2018 Women in Technology STEM Leadership award, Washington Business Journal’s 2020 Women Who Mean Business Award and a 2020 Capital CIO of the Year ORBIE Award Winner, She was included on Wire19’s Top 100 CIO list in 2023 and was named a Top CIO to Watch in 2022 by Washington Executive.
Kathryn Guarini , CIO of IBM, leads a global team of nearly 12,000 employees responsible for delivering the future of IT to propel IBM’s success and growth.
Prior to being named CIO, Guarini was COO of IBM Research and vice present for Impact Science. She led the IBM Research transformation to increase impact, extend technical eminence, and improve the operational efficiency of the division. Her team at Impact Science applied deep technical expertise to the most pressing global challenges facing society while advancing the underlying science.
Guarini holds more than 65 U.S. patents and is a prolific writer. Her work has appeared in more than 60 technical publications and she is the author of the mother-of-invention.net blog about leadership, science and innovation. She is active in mentoring, inspiring and recruiting scientists and engineers of all ages and advocating for greater diversity in the industry.
Jacqueline Guichelaar joined Cisco in February 2019 as senior vice president and group CIO. She spearheaded the creation of a digital architecture to accelerate Cisco’s digital enterprise transformation. She was named the customer experience office for Asia Pacific, Japan and greater China in January of this year.
Named winner of a Gold Stevie Award in the Woman of the Year – Technology category in 2020, Guichelaar is a board member of Covenant House California, which helps homeless and trafficked youths aged 18-24 have access to shelter, food, clothing and education. In addition, she is on the board of the Latino Donor Collaborative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the accurate portrayal and understanding of the contributions American Latinos make to American society, and on the board of Cano Health, which operates value-based primary care centers and supports affiliated medical practices that specialize in primary care for seniors. From 2020 to 2022, she was co-executive sponsor of the Cisco – Cristo Rey Work Study program, which ensures high school students from underserved communities in San Jose are exposed to the latest IT best practices and opportunities.
Guarini holds more than 65 U.S. patents and is a prolific writer. Her work has appeared in more than 60 technical publications and she is the author of the mother-of-invention.net blog about leadership, science and innovation. She is active in mentoring, inspiring and recruiting scientists and engineers of all ages and advocating for greater diversity in the industry.
Cloud data management company Rubrik appointed Anneka Gupta as chief product officer in 2021. She had previously been with LiveRamp for 11 years, advancing from software engineer to president and head of products and platform.
With a background in SaaS and product operations, Gupta has a track record of driving revenue growth, navigating expansions to new markets, as well as spearheading DE&I initiatives. She is a lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and sits on the board of directors for Tinuiti.
Elizabeth Hackenson , CIO of Schneider Electric, has spent more than 30 years leading technology operations and initiatives across large-scale complex organizations. She joined Schneider Electric in 2019. She had previously held CIO roles at AES, Alcatel-Lucent and MCI.
In 2021, Hackenson won the Boston CIO of the Year ORBIE Award from the Boston Leadership Network.
As Zscaler’s CIO, Praniti Lakhwara is responsible for leading the company’s IT solutions and enabling a seamless experience for customers and employees. She drives a comprehensive strategy to help scale the company rapidly, build a world-class IT organization, deliver innovative solutions worldwide and create a secure, robust infrastructure.
A 25-year veteran of the industry, Lakhwara has a proven track record of helping to build best-in-class, execution-focused IT teams. Prior to joining Zscaler, she held various senior level positions at companies such as Conga, Guidewire Software and Align Technology.
Mindy Lieberman is CIO of MongoDB. She leads the company’s global IT organization responsible for business system delivery, data engineering and analytics, corporate infrastructure, collaboration tools and IT operations. Before joining MongoDB in 2019, she served on the IT executive teams at Peloton, Okta, Zendesk and Salesforce. She built out the teams and business system infrastructure to support finance, sales, enterprise data, and employee experience.
Lieberman earned a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and her doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Known for her ability to build talented, collaborative teams who partner effectively to mature systems and processes, her mission is to build the right technology with the right people and do it in the right way.
Sharon Mandell is the senior vice president and CIO for Juniper Networks. She leads the company’s global information technology team in the ongoing enhancement of the company’s IT infrastructure and applications architectures to support the growth objectives of the company. She and her team are also responsible for showcasing Juniper’s use of its technologies to the world.
Prior to joining Juniper in 2020, Mandell was the CIO for TIBCO Software. Over the course of her career, she developed a level of expertise in cybersecurity and compliance, enterprise architecture and road mapping, data and analytics, digital transformation and customer service. She is passionate about supporting women in STEM careers and in her free time Mandell serves on various arts and education related boards. She also proudly serves on the computer science advisory board at Temple University. She earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Temple and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir joined Palo Alto Networks in 2019 and was named CMO two years later. Originally joining Palo Alto Networks to lead marketing for the company’s Cortex business, Ozdemir has built out product marketing, demand generation and sales enablement for the Cortex product portfolio and helped pioneer the XDR category in cybersecurity.
Before joining Palo Alto Networks, Ozdemir spent three years at Palantir leading the development and growth of strategic accounts as well as building out a product marketing function. She also held marketing leadership roles for Google in EMEA, notably leading a project that earned Google a Cannes Lion award. She earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical, computer and system engineering from Harvard University and a doctorate in machine intelligence from the University of Cambridge.
Nutanix CIO Wendy Pfeiffer leads the company’s global IT team and functions that support the company’s operations and employees. drives their global mission with her emphasis on enterprise utilization of cutting-edge technologies. She previously led technology teams for companies including GoPro, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Exodus Communications and Robert Half.
Dedicated to excellence in operations and delivery while maintaining a focus on innovation, Pfeiffer has played a key role in envisioning and delivering business technologies for the past two decades.
Penelope Prett is the chief information, data and analytics officer for Accenture. She leads the company’s global IT operations, including the infrastructure, services and applications that enable Accenture people to work anytime, anywhere to serve clients in more than 120 countries.
During her 30-year tenure with Accenture, Prett has held a number of leadership roles, managing large transformation programs as well as sales and alliances. She has gained significant experience with platform and industry ecosystem partners. In addition, she is active in Accenture’s inclusion and diversity efforts, working on a range of programs including LGBTQIA initiatives and the integration of veterans and other non-traditional talent into the workforce.
Kate Prouty is senior vice president and CIO of Akamai. She oversees the company’s IT organization, responsible for business transformation including global strategy, development and operation of the applications and IT infrastructure that enable agile and efficient user experiences for Akamai’s customers, employees, and partners.
Prouty joined Akamai in 1999. She has led the transformation of Akamai’s business processes with an emphasis on flexibility, agility and user experience. Prior to becoming CIO, she collaborated closely with leaders across the company in HR, finance, platform engineering, product development, services and sales. She has a deep understanding of the criticality of security, risk and compliance across Akamai’s business and the industry. Prouty co-chairs the Executive Women’s Network at Akamai.
Meerah Rajavel is CIO of Palo Alto Networks. She is responsible for the company’s global information technology functions, driving a comprehensive strategy to scale and rapidly deliver innovative solutions for our worldwide teams.
Prior to joining Palo Alto Networks in 2022, Rajavel was CIO at Citrix. Before that she held leadership roles at McAfee, Forcepoint, Cisco and Infosys. She has an in-depth understanding of the IT challenges across the industry, among organizations of all sizes.
Rajavel earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from the Thiagarajar College of Engineering at Anna University in Chennai, India. She also holds a master’s degree in business administration from the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University.
Reeny Sondhi joined Twilio in 2022 as the company’s first CIO. She leads the scale of all technology operations needed as the company focuses on scaling and becoming an end-to-end customer engagement platform. With over 25 years of experience in technology, she enjoys building teams that bring pragmatism and creativity to complex problems and can inspire others toward one vision.
Sondhi came to Twilio from Autodesk, where she served as chief security officer, responsible for driving the company’s security and trust strategy for infrastructure, products and services. Before that, she led security engineering for EMC, now part of Dell. She made a transition to security after years in product management, launching multiple hardware and software products. Sondhi has been recognized by San Francisco Business Times as one of the “Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business.”
Julie Sweet is chair and CEO of Accenture. She joined the company in 2010 as general counsel, chief compliance officer and corporate secretary. She became CEO in September 2019 and assumed the additional position of chair in 2021. Before joining Accenture, she was a partner for 10 years in the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore.
Sweet earned her bachelor’s degree from Claremont McKenna and her J.D, from Columbia Law School. She is board chair of Catalyst, a global nonprofit working with some of the world’s most powerful CEOs and leading companies to help build workplaces that work for women and serves on the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum, the Center for Strategic & International Studies and the Marriott Foundation for People with Disabilities – Bridges from School to Work. She has been recognized as one of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in Business and by Forbes as one of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.
Lorraine Twohill has been with Google for more than 20 years, the last 14 as chief marketing officer (CMO). She joined the company in 2003 as head of EMEA marketing. She previously served as head of marketing for Opodo.
As CMO, Twohill is responsible for Google’s global marketing function. She graduated from Dublin City University with a joint honors degree in international marketing and languages. She serves on the board of directors of Palo Alto Networks.
Lorraine Twohill has been with Google for more than 20 years, the last 14 as chief marketing officer (CMO). She joined the company in 2003 as head of EMEA marketing. She previously served as head of marketing for Opodo.
As CMO, Twohill is responsible for Google’s global marketing function. She graduated from Dublin City University with a joint honors degree in international marketing and languages. She serves on the board of directors of Palo Alto Networks.
Today, March 8, is International Women’s Day (IWD), a global celebration of the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating women’s equality.
The theme for this year’s IWD is “Embrace Equity.” According to the WomenTech Network, at the current pace of change, it will take more than 132 years to close the economic gender gap.
In the tech industry, women are both underrepresented and underpaid. Women make up about 28% of the tech industry workforce, but only 10.9% of CEO or senior leadership roles. And while tech jobs are, in general, higher paying than in other industries, women still earn only 82 cents to every dollar that men earn. “Careers in science and STEM pay well for women, but despite this fact, the gender wage gap still exists,” says Nicole Smith, a research professor and chief economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
But women, especially those in the communications and tech channel, have never been ones to sit around and wait for things to happen. In the words of the song, “Sisters are doing it for themselves.” Just check out what the Alliance of Channel Women (ACW) and Cloud Girls are doing — supporting, mentoring, educating, celebrating and honoring their peers in the industry.
Similarly, the WomenTech Network is a leading community for women in tech. Like ACW and Gloud Girls, they work to empower women in tech through leadership development, professional growth, mentorship and networking events. They work to inspire women to make a difference by building impactful and inclusive technology while introducing them to like-minded people, inspiring speakers and opportunities at leading companies that aim to create diverse teams and a culture of belonging.
100 Women to Watch
The WomenTech C-Level Network’s annual “100 Women to Watch” list highlights some of the top technologists, innovators and influential women holding leadership positions in the tech industry. Women who are setting a precedent for future generations with their exemplary accomplishments and leadership. The WomenTech C-Level Network compiled the list on the basis of information pulled from nominations, direct applications, database information, interviews, company websites and other public information.
So in honor of International Women’s Day, scroll through the gallery above to see some of the top female executive in the communications and IT gallery that made the “100 Women in Tech Leaders to Watch in 2023” list.
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