Our Executive Leadership Team

Marion Smith, CFO – LinkedIn
Marion joined Virtana as CFO, with over 20 years of senior management and start-up experience, serving in executive roles from early stage through exit, including IPO and acquisitions. He has a passion for high-growth, disruptive, technology-driven ventures, and has held key leadership roles in seven startups. Marion’s successful track record includes his contributions to strong leadership teams, focused on effective business management and enterprise growth.

Marion most recently served as CFO for Hazelcast, successfully raising over $50M in equity and debt, while building out a full business team. He joined Hazelcast from Pulse Secure where he served as VP & GM of the company’s vADC Business Unit, overseeing all aspects of strategy, execution, and GTM with P&L responsibility for the company’s global vADC business.

Marion’s leadership has enhanced the success of Brocade Communications, Renewvia Energy, Micron Misting, and e-lingo. He was also part of the founding team at internet pioneer Inktomi, helping build the company from start-up to one of the most successful IPOs of the late 90’s. Marion holds a BS in Economics from Georgia State University and serves in advisory roles at several tech companies.

Kamelia Gouchev, SVP of Customer Success – LinkedIn

With over 20 years of customer-focused IT experience, Kamelia brings understanding of the customer journey and expertise in developing end-to-end relationships across the customer lifecycle. She is skilled at building and leading teams responsible for delivering excellent customer experience and driving growth through customers success, product adoption, and expansion. In her last role at New Relic, Kamelia was Director of Customer Success, leading the post-sales strategy and execution for Key Accounts. Prior to New Relic, she spent 13 years at Oracle in various technical and leadership positions in Customer Success, Support, Services, and Renewals.

Kamelia has a BA from the American University in Bulgaria, majoring in Journalism & Mass Communications as well as Anthropology. She also earned a Master of Science in Information Technologies degree from Bentley University.

Steve Hershkowitz, CRO – LinkedIn
Steve has more than 20 years of experience leading high-performing sales teams across Fortune 100 companies and small aggressive start-ups, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco, Avaya, 3Com, LuxN, and most recently, Pensando Systems. He excels at executing worldwide go-to-market strategies, competing at the highest levels to drive profitable revenue growth and help customers transform their businesses. He played key roles in HPE’s targeted acquisitions, divestitures, and core strategy—all while managing its $2 billion-dollar US Large Enterprise portfolio.

As CRO of Virtana, Steve is focused on the company’s expansion into the hybrid cloud segment, scaling the business with partnerships, while improving operational efficiencies.

Steve studied business at the University of Maryland and is proud to have earned his tireless work ethic and discipline during his six years in the United States Air Force. Outside of exceeding sales goals, Steve can be found spending time with family, traveling, playing golf, cycling, and hiking.

Kimberly Perryman, VP of People – LinkedIn

Kimberly brings over 13 years of experience in Talent Acquisition and Human Resources, with the last seven years dedicated to scaling rapid-growth companies in technology. She has a history of building teams and departments from the ground up, hiring top talent, and assisting in all areas of change management, training, leadership development, risk management and the overall organizational structure of companies.

Her dedication to building strong company cultures has allowed her to make many significant impacts to turnover, employee engagement, and to the success of the departments she leads and departments she provides advice to. As the VP of People for Virtana, Kimberly promotes and strengthens the company’s commitment to people development and creating a culture that puts its people and customers first.

Jon Cyr – VP, Product Management – LinkedIn
Jonathan (Jon) Cyr is responsible for Product Management at Virtana. In this role, Jon owns the overall strategy and product direction of the Virtana portfolio of IT Operations Management (ITOM) products. In addition, Jon also leads the Product and Technology Enablement team.

Jon brings twenty-plus years’ experience in architecting enterprise solutions for the ITOM market. Recently, his focus has been on hybrid cloud and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) services, primarily at Dell EMC and John Hancock. Prior to Dell EMC, he spent 14 years at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise in product line management and customer success, delivering solutions for the ITOM Software market.

Jon served for more than 11 years in the Connecticut Army National Guard, where he supported domestic and international relief missions. During his time in the Army National Guard, he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Connecticut School of Business, and subsequently an MBA from Sacred Heart University.

Christina Richards, CMO – LinkedIn
As the Chief Marketing Officer for Virtana, Christina Richards brings 25 years of marketing, engineering, and revenue-acceleration experience to Virtana to help fuel its next phase of growth. Christina owns the overall marketing strategy for Virtana including corporate marketing, brand strategy, product marketing, and demand generation.

Prior to joining Virtana, she served in Marketing and Business Development leadership roles at Silicon Valley startups like Aeris and AOptix, as well as large global firm Nortel Networks. Christina earned her B.S. Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech, and her MBA from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

Amit Rathi, VP Engineering – LinkedIn
Amit Rathi is Vice President of Engineering at Virtana. He leads all aspects of development, testing, devops, support and cloud operations for Virtana’s products. Amit brings a strong software engineering, customer-centric background and 20+ years of experience in Virtana’s specific Information Technology Operations Management (ITOM) domain. Amit recently spent 12 years at BMC Software, building enterprise on-premises and SaaS projects, delivering customer-centric product experiences and developing high-quality products.

Throughout his career, Amit has been responsible for transforming legacy products into high-quality solutions that deliver outcomes for customers. He has built new SaaS services from scratch, and designed and created scalable architecture for enterprise solutions.