Rubrik Taps ServiceNow CMO As Its First President

Dan Rogers, who joins Rubrik after several years of C-level experience at ServiceNow, Symantec, AWS and Microsoft, is the latest in a string of executive hires Rubrik has made in the last couple years to prepare for future growth, particularly in the cloud.

Data protection and data management technology developer Rubrik said Wednesday that the company has hired Dan Rogers as its first-ever company president.

Rogers will lead Rubrik's go-to-market operations and work with Rubrik's chief revenue officer Britt Shirk to drive its product, marketing and go-to-market strategy, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said.

Rogers has been working as the chief marketing officer of workflow software developer ServiceNow, Santa Clara, Calif., where over the last four years he helped drive that company's annual revenue growth an average of 33 percent year-over-year.

[Related: Investors Make Huge $261 Million Bet On Rubrik]

Prior to Rogers, Rubrik did not have a company president, Rogers told CRN. "I can claim to be the first," he said.

Rubrik is more than a storage vendor, Rogers said.

"At the highest level, every company is becoming a software company," he said. "As every company digitizes, it will go through a data revolution. Rubrik is very well placed to be at the center of data management, data performance, data classification, and data analysis."

Rubrik is at a point in its life where it needs to invest in its next round of growth, Rogers said.

"This is a great opportunity to look at the next phase of growth," he said. "Rubrik has publicly said it has a $600-million booking run rate. When I started at ServiceNow, we were about $1 billion in revenue, and the company is now at about $3.5 billion. Some of the pieces I saw when I started at ServiceNow are similar to what I'm seeing now at Rubrik. It's time to capitalize on that growth."

Rogers said his major responsibility is to help build on Rubrik's momentum and accelerate growth.

"I'll be looking at opportunities to do that against a background of customers looking for help to transform their data management," he said. "They're really asking us to manage data across all their clouds. This is a special time at Rubrik. Data is at the strategic heart of businesses. Over 2,500 companies trust their Rubrik to be their data platform. We have a beautiful market moment to take advantage of that."

That emphasis on cloud-focused management of data fits well with Rogers' background. Prior to his work at ServiceNow, he also served as chief marketing officer at Symantec between 2015 and 2016, and before that spent about two years at Salesforce and two years at Amazon Web Services, and was working with Microsoft's cloud business between 2009 and 2011.

"Rubrik has relationships with all the cloud companies including AWS, Azure and Google," he said. "Customers are demanding that data works seamlessly over these clouds."

Rogers is the latest in a string of top executive hirings by Rubrik as part of what he termed Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha's "dream team."

The company in May of 2019 appointed Rinki Sethi, IBM's former vice president of information security, to be the company's new chief information security officer.

That same month, Rubrik hired Wendy Bahr, Cisco's former channel chief, as the company's first chief commercial officer.

Rubrik in March of 2019 appointed Brett Shirk, VMware's former senior vice president and general manager Americas, as its new chief revenue officer. And in July of 2018, Rubrik also hired former VMware executive Avon Puri as its chief information officer.

Rogers said the quality of Rubrik's board of directors was also a big part of his decision to join the company. The board includes John Chambers, former Cisco CEO, who in mid-2018 joined Rubrik as the company's board advisor and invested an undisclosed sum in the company. Other members of the board include former Microsoft Chairman and former Symantec CEO John Thompson, who is also an investor, and Enrique Salem, former Symantec CEO.

Roger's move to Rubrik is a shot in the arm the company needs to get the experience to continue driving towards the cloud market, said a Rubrik solution provider who requested anonymity due to close relationships with both Rubrik and its close competitor Cohesity.

"It's an area where Rubrik has been a little weaker than Cohesity," the solution provider told CRN. "And it's becoming more and more relevant to enterprise customers."

Rubrik has a good customer base, and so it is not going away, the solution provider said. "They just need to find a way to better compete with Cohesity and with Dell EMC's DPA (Data Protection Advisor)," the solution provider said.