Bespoke Partners Recruits Chief Marketing Officer for BlueCat Networks

August 26, 2022 – San Diego, CA-headquartered executive search firm Bespoke Partners recently placed David Duncan as chief marketing officer of BlueCat Networks in Toronto. Katherine Baker and Kim Le led the assignment. “David’s experience and track record for leading and nurturing agile marketing teams is a tremendous asset,” said Stephen Devito, CEO of BlueCat. “His passion for DNS and extensive cybersecurity background will serve us well as we share our stories with customers and prospects around the globe.”

Mr. Duncan brings more than 30 years of marketing, cybersecurity, and network infrastructure experience. As CMO, he will drive brand awareness and growth for BlueCat’s DNS, DHCP, and IP address management (together known as DDI) solutions. He will oversee product marketing, demand generation, channel marketing, community marketing, and corporate communications functions.

Before joining BlueCat, Mr. Duncan served as vice president of integrated marketing at Gitlab, where he drove demand generation, channel marketing, and field marketing to help the company achieve a successful IPO with the highest pipeline coverage in its history. He has also held senior marketing roles at Broadcom, CA Technologies, Tenable, and Webroot.

“I’m thrilled to join BlueCat – a pioneer and leader in DDI,” said Mr. Duncan. “Customer adoption of DDI solutions is accelerating as enterprises recognize the need to scale their networks to support hybrid cloud, infrastructure, and application modernization, and invest more in DNS security. I’m eager to contribute to a market-leading company that is consistently recognized by customers for delivering exceptional value and service, and by employees for being a great workplace.”

BlueCat is the Adaptive DNS company. The company’s mission is to help the world’s largest organizations thrive on network complexity, from branch to the enterprise to the cloud.

Serving the PE Sector

Bespoke Partners is an executive search and leadership advisory firm dedicated to partnering with top private equity firms, including Francisco Partners, Clearlake Capital, WCAS, Insight Partners, GI Partners, General Atlantic, CVC Capital Partners, and TA Associates, among scores of others, to recruit software talent and assess and evaluate teams at every stage of the investment lifecycle, from growth equity to buyout.

The search firm has completed over 600 searches since its inception a decade ago. Its expertise includes all C-level searches across multiple functional domains, including financial officers, HR and people, marketing and technology, as well as board of directors and internal private equity operating partner searches. The firm’s expanding leadership advisory platform includes organizational due diligence as well as executive assessment and coaching.

Based in Bespoke’s San Diego office, Ms. Baker helps build the executive teams for private equity backed software and technology companies. Prior to joining Bespoke in 2017, she spent four years focused on recruiting for the finance and accounting space across all industries including SAAS, biotech, energy, and defense from Fortune 500 companies to start-ups.

Ms. Le is a principal at Bespoke Partners based in Austin, TX. She helps build the executive teams and boards for private equity-backed software and technology companies. Prior to joining Bespoke, Ms. Le was a management consultant in the talent & organization/human potential practice at Accenture where she led change management initiatives on large business transformation projects through all stages of the software development lifecycle.

Chief Marketing Officers

As business becomes more global and complex, and power shifts from producers of goods and services to consumers, the chief marketing officer’s job of planning and coordinating marketing activities has become more challenging, recruiters say. Yet executive search firms are seeing no shortage of assignments for this important C-level position.

Current business landscape demands have only increased the contribution from CMOs, according to the latest research report from Forrester and Heidrick & Struggles. The survey found that CMOs are building strong relationships with the head of product and research and development to prepare their organizations for digital disruption.

“We see CMOs moving beyond functional expertise to assume responsibility for driving overall growth within their organizations,” said Sheryl Pattek, vice president, CMO executive partner at Forrester. “They are evolving into key strategic partners on the executive team and know that collaboration with the rest of the C-suite will be instrumental to their success.”

Here’s a sampling of recent chief marketing officer searches taken from the Hunt Scanlon Media archives:

ZRG Partners, a leading search firm backed by private equity firm RFE Investment Partners, recently assisted in the recruitment of Mark Gaydos as chief marketing officer of NASDAQ-traded CalAmp in Irvine, CA. Managing director and technology practice leader Lisa Hooker led the assignment along with Douglas Madden, managing director in the technology practice. “Mark’s proven product marketing leadership, demand generation expertise and deep understanding of enterprise software and technology companies will be extremely valuable to CalAmp as we continue our transformation to a leading software-as-a-service provider,” said Jeff Gardner, CEO of CalAmp.

Mercedes Chatfield-Taylor, a co-founder of Artico Search, has placed Jen Jones as chief marketing officer of commercetools, a platform for next-generation B2C and B2B commerce. In her new position, Ms. Jones oversees commercetools’ global brand, marketing, and corporate communications efforts, including brand strategy and design, customer marketing, demand generation, product marketing, marketing analytics and operations. Prior to joining commercetools, Ms. Jones was chief marketing officer at Dataminr. With offices in San Francisco, New York, and Austin, TX, Artico is off to one of the fastest starts among boutique search firms in recent memory.

ON Partners recently placed David Greenberg as the new chief marketing officer for Conversica, a provider of conversational AI solutions for enterprise revenue teams. Consultant Aaron Clark led the assignment. “We’re addressing a real need with applied AI,” said Jim Kaskade, CEO of Conversica. “I am thrilled for David to join our executive team roundtable. His experience in marketing leadership with practically every high-growth success in the Pacific Northwest will prove vital and contribute greatly to Conversica’s success in 2022. I need a powerhouse marketeer to guide Conversica to market growth and dominance in a time of explosive competition. I couldn’t be more excited to begin the year adding David’s energy and expertise.”