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It's in with the new and good-bye to the old today at Acquia.
The Boston-based digital experience provider simultaneously welcomed a new CMO and parted ways with former CMO Tom Wentworth.
Wentworth, who moved from CMO to senior vice president of product in August, is leaving the company to become CMO of open source predictive analytics startup RapidMiner in Cambridge, Mass.
Loren Jarrett, a former vice president of product management and marketing at FatWire and Oracle, will become Acquia's new CMO Monday.
Big Changes
Wentworth joined Acquia as CMO in December 2012. Before that, he was CMO at Ektron, which later merged with EPiServer. He also held positions at Interwoven (2000-2007) and Autonomy (2007-2009).
He said he's leaving after Acquia's three-day conference next week, Acquia Engage. Wentworth said 600 people have registered for the InterContinental Boston event that starts Oct. 20.
"I was going to transition into a product role here," Wentworth told CMSWire today. "But after some soul searching, I realized that after 15 years in WCM, it's time for me to learn something new. And I also realized I really liked marketing, and the chance to grow a company was really appealing."
Jarrett joins Acquia as the company positions itself for an IPO. Investors last month gave Acquia $55 million in a funding round that will help the company “build out in all areas,” according to a company executive.
Acquia landed in the “leaders” category back-to-back in 2014 and 2015 in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web CMS. It’s a “strong performer” in Forrester’s Wave for CMS.
Acquia is also bracing for the full release of the Drupal 8 platform. Acquia was co-founded by Drupal’s creator, Dries Buytaert, now Acquia’s chief technology officer. Drupal 8 is due out this fall.
More About Jarrett
Jarrett was CMO of Kaseya, which offers cloud-based IT management software systems, for two years.
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According to her LinkedIn profile, she restructured and rebuilt the marketing organization at Kaseya "from the ground up" after the company was acquired by a private equity firm. She led demand generation, product marketing (strategy, packaging, pricing, messaging/positioning, sales enablement), and corporate marketing (content marketing, web, creative, branding) functions.
Before that, she held executive roles at American Express, Oracle, FatWire and CA Technologies.
"She knows the space," Wentworth said. "She's going to be great."
Wentworth's Plans
Wentworth's new company, RapidMiner, was founded by Ingo Mierswa. He served as CEO but is now the CTO. Peter Lee, former TIBCO executive, was named RapidMiner's CEO in June.
Mierswa started to develop RapidMiner at the Artificial Intelligence Division of the TU Dortmund University in Germany. Under his leadership, RapidMiner has grown up to 300 percent per year over the past five years. In 2012, he opened offices in the US.
"RapidMiner has a similar story to Acquia," Wentworth said. "Like Dries (Buytaert), RapidMiner's founder is European and a huge proponent of open source. It's built a predictive analytics product that lets business analysts easily assemble predictive models using data across a variety of sources, like Hadoop, SQL databases, etc. These models can then be 'operationalized' to automate business processes like customer churn prevention, customer lifetime value, financial risk, customer segmentation, etc."
Gartner named RapidMiner a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms in March. Forrester Research named RapidMiner as a "strong performer" in its April Wave for Big Data Predictive Analytics Solutions.
