Welcome Chief Marketing Officer Chris Pick

I’m thrilled to officially welcome Chris Pick as Tanium’s Chief Marketing Officer. As of December 2019, Chris will lead our global marketing organization toward our goals of driving predictable growth, establishing brand equity across our massive total addressable market and positioning Tanium for long-term strategic relevance.

Chris is a highly respected industry leader with over 25 years of experience in building new categories and executing differentiated go-to-market strategies. He joins us from Apptio, where he served as Chief Marketing Officer for the last nine years, and notably, led the creation of the Technology Business Management software category. This category leadership significantly differentiated Apptio, enabling a successful IPO in 2016 and a $2B acquisition by Vista Equity earlier this year.

Among many accomplishments, Chris also founded the global non-profit Technology Business Management (TBM) Council, to drive industry collaboration, education and standardization (including changing U.S. law) of technology cost optimization and financial planning. Through this approach, Apptio gained direct access to over 10,000 CIOs, who influence over $1T (1/6th) of worldwide technology spending.

Chris is originally from Calgary, Canada, is the proud father of two, and is an avid hiker and sports fan. I asked Chris to share a bit with me about why he’s joining us, and why now.

Chris, one of the first things that stood out from our initial conversations was your focus on servant leadership. Why is this so important?

CHRIS PICK:

My philosophy is to “make it count” every day. Rather than make just company outcomes our main focus, servant leadership is about putting customers first, driving real conversations that inspire new insights, and ultimately, making connections that help our customers and partners achieve their business goals.

Tanium is honored to serve many of the world’s largest enterprise and government customers managing IT environments with complex technical demands. Their needs— how we make it count and do better for and with them every single day—are top of the list for me, my team, and all of us at Tanium.

In your previous role, you led the way on the creation of Technology Business Management, a market category that’s now mainstream in software and in all enterprise technology functions.

CHRIS PICK:

TBM’s creation was very important for Apptio, including for sustained growth and their competitive domination over both small pure-plays and massive infrastructure and operations providers. But more importantly, TBM was the output of a team that listened deeply to our customers and recognized that the ways in which they evaluated, procured and managed software were changing. IT isn’t just a cost center—it should be run like a business and aligned to business outcomes, which, as I think we can agree, gets us to true digital transformation.

Tanium is a different category, but definitely positioned at a critical place in today’s technology landscape. Most IT operations and security teams are misaligned and can’t count on true visibility and control of their IT estate, and businesses are left vulnerable because of an over-reliance on point security products and management tools that don’t cleanly work well together.

A platform approach for unified endpoint management and security, which Tanium uniquely offers, is proving fundamental for our customers and transforming how they manage endpoints at unprecedented speed and scale. It’s a different and much more comprehensive approach than adding point tools, which increase complexity but aren’t ultimately making the IT environment easier to manage—or more secure.

What can the Tanium community expect from you right away?

CHRIS PICK:

What impressed me most about the Tanium vision for product and service is that above all, it’s customer-centric—reflective of what CIOs, CISOs and the many stakeholders in IT are going through today instead of some theoretical take on what “might” work for them. Tanium is solving hard challenges in IT that previously seemed insurmountable, such as full patch deployment and asset management in a matter of hours, not days or weeks, and visibility of all connected endpoints—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of endpoints—in near-real-time. It’s remarkable, and the thing I heard from many of the CIOs I spoke to before joining Tanium was just how compelling both the technology and the service behind it are for resolving their enterprise issues.

So, I’m here as part of a next-level leadership team to help accelerate our ongoing growth and market expansion and serve our customers. We’re all here to grow together, and customers can count on transparency, accountability and energy from all of us here at Tanium!

Welcome to the team, Chris!