Meet CloudBees’s New Chief Revenue Officer, John Giannitsis!

CloudBees is moving up and to the right in the DevOps space – exactly the right time to grow our team. We sat down with John Giannitsis, CloudBees’s new Chief Revenue Officer, to find out more about him and his role at the company. Hi, John. Welcome to EC and the EC community! Let’s start by finding out a bit about you, and what you do at EC?

Before CloudBees I was Senior VP of Sales at OnBoardify. I’ve also lead sales teams at Keynote Systems, MKS (now PTC), Rational Software (now IBM), and Computer Associates. Despite my propensity for sales, I actually have a technology background with Bachelor’s Degree in computer science. Early in my career I worked as a programmer, but it didn’t take long to realize that my passion is fueled by building relationships with clients, partners and co-workers. My background in sales spans more than 20 years, where I’ve led teams to big revenue numbers and company acquisitions. However, as an organizational leader, I’ve been fortunate enough to discover my true passion in developing teams and connecting people. At CloudBees, I have the opportunity to act as both leader and ambassador of the sales team, while driving a cohesive effort across departments to execute the company’s vision of being THE leader of DevOps Release Automation. Day-to-day, I work closely with the sales, marketing and engineering teams to increase collaboration and build continuity in our processes, while aiming to eliminate the bottlenecks along the way. These efforts help CloudBees meet customer needs better and address pain points on a continuous basis as a byproduct of faster feedback loops. You may be sensing a parallel with DevOps here and that’s exactly what we are trying to do – operate based on the principles of DevOps in order to take advantage of the growing market while being as lean as possible.

Why CloudBees?

The Application Release Automation (ARA) market presents a huge growth opportunity. Being fortunate enough to join a superb team of people who have laid out a solid framework for success makes my role in this company a special one. I look forward to helping unlock new cultural achievements so that our teams can quickly uncover and address broad pain points of our customers, generate better feedback loops from an inside sales perspective and be increasingly agile about winning new keystone enterprise customers. Right now, we are riding a huge wave of momentum after being positioned by Gartner as a Leader in its 2016 Magic Quadrant for Application Release Automation . This is translating into market success as well, as our team has recently won new ARA deals with leading companies in banking, automotive, and more. As a leader, I draw a lot of inspiration from the executives that I’ve had the opportunity to work alongside. Take Charles Wang, founder of CA, for example -- he has very humble roots growing up a Queens boy, attending a Queens College and he built this amazing empire. To me that is the ultimate success story. Another leader I’ve taken valuable lessons from is Umong Gupta, founder of Keynote Systems (now Dynatrace). He instilled the importance of building a strong company culture and making it feel like a family. Frankly, we tend to spend more time with our work family than we spend at home and we shouldn’t have to wake up dreading work. So far, CloudBees has exceeded my expectations – not just in terms of the career opportunity, but the excellent team of people I have the pleasure of working with every day. It truly is a family environment, which I believe to be the cornerstone of any high-performing organization. A strong culture breeds a well-connected group of people that are hungry for what the future holds. I also was drawn to CloudBees because it didn’t just sit back on the success of its foundational solutions these past years. The company has kept its eyes on the marketplace and was able to pivot at the right time to capture new opportunities. This is what makes CloudBees current and relevant and I’m looking forward to being a part of the company’s bright future. With streamlined collaboration and aligned efforts across the organization, we are going to take the company to the next level.

What about life outside of work?

When I’m not at the office or on business travel, I love to spend time with my family. I’ve been married to my wife for 28 years and we have four children – 24-year-old triplets and an 18-year-old who is starting college this fall. I’m an avid motorcycle rider and I also love to golf, ski and travel.

Thanks for taking the time to sit down with us. Any last thoughts?

It’s great to be here and I’m looking forward to helping drive CloudBees into a strong 2017 and beyond!

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