As you may know, Keith Tilley, our EVP and Co-Chair, left Sungard Availability Services at the end of September after almost four decades with the company. Keith explained, “While this was not a decision that I reached lightly, I feel this is a great time to spend more time with my family, as well as to pursue some other professional interests that have me intrigued. As most of you know, I’ve been with the business nearly 40 years. I’ve had the great pleasure of leading teams throughout our journey from a traditional recovery business to what we are today – a fully resilient and recoverable infrastructure solutions provider.
He continues, “No matter how long you’ve been a Sungard AS customer, I’m confident you’ve seen many changes over the years as we’ve continued to evolve our business to meet your needs. I have every confidence the business will continue to evolve and thrive to remain competitive in the market, and to deliver truly integrated recovery and production solutions that you’ve come to rely on us to deliver.”
Keith is well-known to many Sungard AS customers, and the industry as a whole, and leaves huge shoes to fill. However, we are delighted to share the news that his role representing the voice of the customer, bringing customer experience and market perspective to all business decisions to Sungard AS, will be fulfilled by a new London-based Chief Marketing Officer, Kathy Schneider who reports direct to Andy Stern, Chief Executive Officer for Sungard AS. Kathy officially joined us on 29 August and is responsible for Global Marketing, Global Market Strategy, and Corporate Communications.
Kathy brings more than two decades of technology and business-to-business marketing experience at both pre-IPO and Fortune 500 companies. She joins us most recently from Level 3 Communications where she was Senior Vice President, Product and Marketing – EMEA. Prior to Level 3, Kathy was with Criteo, a publicly-traded technology company specialising in digital marketing and big data. At Criteo she held a global role on the executive leadership team as Senior Vice President, Marketing & Communications.
Before that, she worked at Dell Inc for 14 years in a variety of marketing leadership roles in the US and EMEA. While at Dell, she gained extensive experience leading marketing functions at a country, regional and global level. She has spent the last 13 years working and living in London with her family and has dual US. and UK citizenship.
Remarking on her new role, Kathy said: “For more than 35 years, Sungard AS has been reputed as the market leader for delivering recovery solutions that keep enterprises and organizations ‘always on’ and able to meet their business objectives. Over the last several years, the company has transformed its solutions portfolio to also offer fully resilient production and recovery services. I am thrilled to be joining Sungard AS at such a pivotal time as it continues to evolve its solutions portfolio and help customers across their entire IT deployment.”
We also announce that Charles Quinn joined the Sungard AS team in August as Senior Vice President, EMEA Sales and is based in London. Charles brings over 25 years of sales and leadership experience working for some of the most successful technology companies in the world, such as Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Microsoft and others. In each of these organisations, Charles has a proven track-record of building strong growth positions in highly competitive markets.
Most recently, Charles served as Group Managing Director for ECS, a fast-growing and award-winning IT consultancy and professional services company. In this capacity, he was responsible for the group strategy, growth and results delivery. Revenue grew impressively under his leadership. Prior to ECS, he spent a considerable length of time with Hewlett-Packard where, among other roles he notably served as a Vice President for a key division within EMEA. Throughout his career, Charles has established himself as a highly-respected business leader with a customer-centric and engaging leadership approach.
Keith played a huge part in shaping Sungard AS into the company it is today and we are sure you will join us in wishing him all the best in the next stage of his career, and at the same time, extend a warm welcome to Kathy and Charles.