Charu Madan

I started my career about 20 years ago at Cisco Systems as an intern. After 6 months, they offered me a role as a product manager, which I did for about 2 years before getting promoted to product manager and product marketing manager for a set of services Cisco was offering. I then moved to Cisco's corporate development team where I worked on M&A, partnerships, and strategic alliances, and that's when I realized I really love this world of strategic alliances and partnerships. I became the first solution product manager in Cisco's IoT group when Internet of Things was just starting to catch on, bringing together Cisco hardware, third-party software, and services companies as joint solutions that we took to market internationally, traveling to China, Japan, and other parts of Asia Pacific. I left Cisco in 2013 and joined Pentaho as Director of Business Development to grow relationships with Cisco, HP, and Hitachi. Based on my efforts, we got acquired by Hitachi Data Systems and I got promoted to Senior Director. I then joined Nutanix, a high-growth startup that was already a unicorn and went to IPO, which was an amazing journey. After that, I was recruited into Veeam for a few years, and then joined Innovacer where I've been for the last 5 years. I was brought in to start the strategic alliances, partnerships, and M&A function from the ground up.