SignalFx Appoints former Andreessen Horowitz operating partner Mark Cranney as Chief Commercial Officer

SAN MATEO, CA--(Marketwired - Jun 20, 2017) - SignalFx, a leader in monitoring and operational intelligence for the cloud, today announced that it has appointed Mark Cranney as the company's new chief commercial officer (CCO). Mark will drive growth for SignalFx by leading all go-to-market operations, including sales, marketing, business development, customer success, support and services for the company.

"We are extremely excited to add Mark to the SignalFx executive team," said Karthik Rau, CEO and co-founder at SignalFx. "Mark has built a career out of taking disruptive new ideas and making them mainstream. We are undergoing another major disruption in our industry as the enterprise embraces new digital initiatives involving high-velocity release cycles and cloud-native architectures. Mark will be a driving force in raising awareness of SignalFx as the best solution for monitoring these new environments and scaling a customer-centric field organization that can deliver on this promise to every customer."

"After 6 plus years at a16z being at the point of the innovation spear connecting startups with the largest organizations in the world, I've had the unique opportunity to see the enormity of the problem SignalFx is helping customers to solve as they move their architectures from monolithic to modern software applications and microservices comprised of containers, orchestration management platforms, and serverless computing," said Mark Cranney, SignalFx's CCO. "I'm excited beyond description to partner with such seasoned product and technical co-founders in Karthik and Phil to build the customer facing capabilities to help our customers accelerate their journey to a modern cloud environment."

Prior to joining SignalFx, Cranney was an operating partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a Silicon Valley venture capital firm with $6B+ assets under management, where he conceived and built their market development team. His team helped accelerate time-to-market and created thousands of business-building opportunities for several hundred a16z portfolio companies.

In previous roles, Cranney led worldwide field operations at Opsware, where he grew headcount from a handful to 350 people and revenue from $15M to $150M in just shy of four years which resulted in the $1.65B acquisition by Hewlett Packard. His leadership at Opsware helped build the new Data Center Automation category for the company, which is chronicled in Ben Horowitz's book, "The Hard Thing About Hard Things." Mark also held senior executive field operations positions at Hewlett-Packard and other technology companies including Aster Data Systems (acquired by Teradata) and Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) where he was Vice President of Americas.

"Its breakthrough approach to monitoring modern computing environments makes SignalFx the right choice for any company running an important software application," says Ben Horowitz. "Mark Cranney is the great genius of enterprise sales. A great product plus great go-to-market leadership equals a winning company."

"SignalFx is helping enterprises accelerate their return on investment in digital transformation by providing a monitoring solution specifically designed to address the new cloud-native world of containers and microservices," said Devdutt Yellurkar, general partner at Charles River Ventures and board member at SignalFx. "I'm excited to add Mark's proven ability to scale go-to-market efforts on this already stellar management team."

Cranney's appointment comes during a period of growth and momentum for SignalFx. Earlier in June, the company announced it had been named a Cool Vendor in Performance Analysis by Gartner. In May, SignalFx issued general availability of its latest release, featuring new alerting capabilities that empower cloud operations teams to better monitor and manage cloud infrastructure, containers, and applications. SignalFx also announced the availability of its Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 Type 2 report, highlighting the security, availability, process integrity, and privacy controls it has in place to support enterprise use of its service.

Cranney's appointment follows the appointment of several other executives in recent months, including Paul Ross as VP Marketing, Jim Brzezinski as VP Worldwide Sales, Susan Gudenkauf as VP Customer Experience, and Naren Goel as VP Finance.

About SignalFx:
SignalFx is a leader in monitoring & operational intelligence for the cloud. By collecting and monitoring metrics across every component in the cloud, SignalFx maximizes the productivity of cloud operations teams and ensures organizations deliver upon the business promise of digital transformation. The service is optimized for today's container and microservice based architectures, provides powerful and proactive alerting that use machine learning algorithms to dynamically adapt to changing cloud application environments, and provides webscale monitoring for every enterprise. SignalFx is used by Fortune 500 enterprises across financial services, apparel, industrials, telecommunications, media, and by web-scale players like Yelp, Hubspot, Acquia, and Kayak. SignalFx is backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Charles River Ventures.