The longtime Northern California resident now will test her marketing chops against a decidedly different kind of customer: developers. I said this back then and it’s still true today, that it’s fun to get to work in an environment where you have a community that cares about what you’re doing as a company and your marketing efforts.”įormer System i VP of marketing Elaine Lennox is the new chief marketing officer for Zend Technologies. “That was the most fun job I had during the entire time I was at IBM,” she told IT Jungle recently. Lennox, who started work last month at Zend’s headquarters Cupertino, California, remembers the time spent as the VP of System i marketing with a certain degree of fondness. The fact that Lennox identified with the passion that was so obviously emanating from the iSeries customer base allowed to her fit in with the platform diehards. While the animosity has abated somewhat over the last few years, IBM i newbies should know that it used to be quite fiery (as a Google site search for “COMMON Sound Off” of the IT Jungle shows).īut somehow, Lennox, who occupied the hot seat in 20–during the launch of Power6 servers, i5/OS V5R4, and the transition from iSeries to System i5–never seemed to attract the kind of animosity that many of her predecessors and successors have endured. Whoever happens to occupy one of the two hot seats in the IBM i-Power Systems bureaucracy–including the general manager position and the vice president of marketing–can expect a fair amount of vitriol to be aimed their way. While IBM i types absolutely adore the technology and the managers and programmers in Rochester, Minnesota, who make the magic happen, they hold a considerable amount of disdain for the executives based in others parts of the country (mostly located in upstate New York), who they perceive as not doing enough to promote the platform (at best) to intentionally holding the platform back (at its conspiratorial worst). It’s no great secret that IBM i shops have a love/hate relationship with IBM. The hiring of Lennox, along with appointment of a new CFO, sends a signal that Zend is getting ready for a growth spurt, particularly as it pertains to the two hottest growth areas in IT: cloud and mobile computing.
Lennox Takes CMO Job as Zend Plans for GrowthĮlaine Lennox, the former IBM vice president of marketing for the System i platform, has been hired as the chief marketing officer of PHP tool vendor Zend Technologies, it was announced while IT Jungle was on hiatus for the holiday.
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