2019 Digital Hero Honorees changing how we do business in the digital economy

DIGITAL HEROES

AppDirect annually recognizes individuals with the vision, courage, influence, determination, compassion, and curiosity to drive impactful business transformations.

Recognizing the Forces Driving Innovation in the Digital Economy

AppDirect has been on a mission to find these digital heroes and share their stories. Here we present the innovative thinkers and risk-takers who are finding new ways to address digital business challenges and are transforming their companies.

Digital Hero Honoree Img1

AppDirect's 2018 Digital Hero Honorees

Alex Barnett

Director, Developer Platform

We're focused on harnessing the power of innovative technology to improve the lives of our small business customers. We understand that when they succeed, we all do."

Intuit

Alex Barnett

Alex leads Intuit's developer onboarding group, the team that is using the collective power of customers, partners, and developers to give SMBs a smarter way to do business. The open platform and APIs his team provides are a critical part of how Intuit delivers innovations to its customers faster than ever before.

John Chambers

CEO

"If you don't transform and use this technology differently—if you don't reinvent yourself, change your organization structure—you're going to get disrupted."

JC2 Ventures

John Chambers

During his 20-year tenure as Cisco's CEO, John witnessed the dawn of the digital age. As the pace of change accelerated, he broke down internal silos and transformed the company's leadership, engineering, and sales teams to succeed in the digital economy.

Joe Cho

Senior Director of Product Management

"In today's world, the best and most valuable companies are the ones that get digital first. There is always an opportunity for an underdog to displace the incumbent, which makes it incredibly exciting."

ADP

Joe Cho

For many companies, transitioning to a digital-first model is an extremely daunting task. At ADP, Joe has tackled this challenge head-on, brining digital technologies to drive results in a range of areas, from enabling continuous experimentation to re-orientating his company's mindset toward customer-defined value.

Riccardo Ferraresi

Product Owner and Solution Architect for SME Cloud

"Digital is exciting because it allows you to get meaningful, tangible results earlier in the development process. The ability to change depending on market reaction has unmatched value."

Swisscom

Riccardo Ferraresi

In his role at Swisscom, Riccardo gets excited by all of the possibilities to integrate systems and improve the customer experience. His focus is always on delivering the best solution that not only meets customer demand, but also fits his company's need for sustainability, scalability, and operational efficiency.

John Guillaume

Vice President, Product Management, UX, & SaaS

"The most exciting thing about the digital economy is that anything is possible. There are no rules."

Comcast Business

John Guillaume

Never satisfied with business as usual, John is always pushing for disruption across the entire customer experience lifecycle. He leads a team dedicated to creating remarkable experiences to differentiate Comcast's digital services while driving customer adoption.

Nina Harding

Chief of Global Partner Strategy and Program

"The digital economy is creating new economic and business models that are democratizing how we operate and grow. This is a time of true transformation, not for just one country, but the entire world."

Google Cloud

Nina Harding

Nina leads Google Cloud's partner ecosystem strategy and programs that drive digital transformation across Google Cloud worldwide. She is passionate about using technologies to discover business insights and predictions that can be used to transform brick-and-mortar companies to help them thrive in the digital age.

Julia Hartz

Co-Founder and CEO

"Learning something new every day is the most gratifying aspect of what I do."

Eventbrite

Jula Hartz

Since co-founding Eventbrite in 2006, Julia has been at the forefront of using digital technologies to bring people together. Named one of Fortune's "40 Under 40," she is also a strong advocate of leading with empathy, a critical element for success in the digital economy.

Stewart Hawker

Senior Group Product Manager, Digital Cloud Marketplace, Vodafone

"My children are growing up in a world where everything is delivered on-demand, so whenever I create a new product or feature, I always try to imagine if it would pass the test from my kids."

Vodafone

Stewart Hawker

In his role, Stewart has overseen the rollout of the Vodafone Digital Marketplace in Italy, Germany, South Africa, and Spain, and he is working to launch in the UK and Portugal. Stewart is passionate about discovering new use cases for new products, and ultimately how customers can benefit from them.

Irv Henderson

Co-Founder and CEO, Talech

"The core thing we are trying to solve is to reduce business owners' stress. Software, if well-executed, makes that work so simple."

Talech

Irv Henderson

In his role as co-founder and CEO of talech, Irv has found the ideal place to share his passion for helping SMBs access best-in-class point-of-sale systems. Through his work, Irv shows the true power of digital technologies to transform businesses.

Drew Houston

Co-Founder and CEO

"The problems we are solving today are not the problems we were solving 10 years ago."

Dropbox

Drew Houston

Dropbox is a born-in-the-cloud company, but that doesn't mean the company is immune to digital disruption. To continue outpacing the competition, Drew has expertly navigated the shifting marketing for cloud-based collaboration tools, taking the company public in early 2018.

Michael Kim

Senior Product Manager

"It can take tireless effort and grit to push digital transformation initiatives at a large organization like TELUS. But the investment pays off at the end."

Telus

Michael Kim

Under Michael's leadership, TELUS has been able to align business and executive priorities - no small feat - to successfully launch the TELUS Business Apps portfolio to its SMB customers. Moreover, he has been instrumental in reshaping the mindset that telecom companies are just data conduits. His work shows that TELUS, and companies like it, can offer much more to help customers succeed.

Matthew Leppanen

Director of Product, Business Productivity Solutions

"The digital economy is going to drive a pace of change that is beyond anything we've seen before. How we communicate, travel, work, and live will change incredibly fast."

Rogers Communications

Matthew Leppanen

Mathew is focused on driving digital transformation for businesses, from the smallest sole proprietor to the largest enterprise. He firmly believes that customer success is key to Rogers' success, so providing transformative digital solutions is his top priority.

Bob Lord

Chief Digital Officer

"Years ago, competitive dynamics were pretty predictable. Business strategy could be set in a silo with really long time horizons. But today, it can't. The idea of disruption covers everything."

IBM

Bob Lord

Bob is a self-described "transformation junkie," which makes him an ideal fit for his role as IBM's first Chief Digital Officer. Since joining the company, he has jumped head first into changing "Big Blue" from a slow industry behemoth to a faster, more developer-friendly enterprise.

Alex Mireles

Business Solutions Subdirector

“The digital economy is always evolving. What is successful today may not be successful tomorrow. What is impossible today may be possible tomorrow.”

AT&T Mexico

Alex Mireles

Alex understands that if digital is daunting for a huge enterprise, it can seem almost impossible for a small business. That’s why his work focuses on helping businesses in Mexico begin their digital transformation journeys with inexpensive tools: a smartphone and cloud applications.

Bob Neubaum

Director, PTC Partner Marketplace

“Turning over value creation to the ecosystem and allowing them to make our products into something much larger than we could create on our own is incredibly exciting.”

PTC

Bob Neubaum

In the industrial Internet of Things, solutions are never developed in a silo. As the marketplace lead at PTC, Bob is always focused on driving collaboration across the PTC ecosystem, transforming the way PTC develops products and changing the company as a whole.

Kalu Njoku

Business Transformation Specialist

“I see my customers as heroes. I aim to create success stories, and I want them to feel like they’re heroes in their own stories. When I see them making huge jumps in productivity and efficiency, it’s truly inspiring.”

Bluegrass Cellular

Kalu Njoku

In his role, Kalu’s main and most important job has been getting others to believe that Bluegrass Cellular could be bigger than a mobile devices company and do more. He has been on a mission to give businesses in rural America access to powerful cloud-based solutions and guide them on their journey to digital transformation.

Mark Register

Senior VP, Business Development & Channels

“More and more customers are going to want to work with marketplace technologies from their resellers or their partners because they makes it so simple to buy.”

DocuSign

Mark Register

After 30 years in technology, Mark has seen what it takes to succeed in the industry. He relies on that expertise every day as he leads a global team that works with partners. His philosophy? Keep it simple. Don't try and overcomplicate what you do.

Michael Roberts

Chief Marketing & Digital Strategy Officer

“The conversation is definitely changing from just security and cost of acceptance to a balance of acceptance, security, and customer experience. Customer experience has become key.”

Bank of America

Michael Roberts

Fast, secure, seamless payments are the backbone of the digital economy, a fact that Michael understands better than most. In his role at Bank of America, he is focused on bringing new digital payments technology to businesses and consumers so they can grow faster.

Alain Schaefer

Digital Program Lead

“I’m inspired by companies that faced the abyss of disruption and managed to turn around and reinvent themselves.”

ABB

Alain Schaefer

How do you digitally transform a 125-year-old company? It’s a question that Alain relishes trying to solve. He leads the team that manages the company’s Ability Marketplace, a rich portfolio of digital solutions and a tool that is reinventing how ABB does business.

Rupen Shah

Vice President, ISV Alliances & Strategy

“The digital economy is about breaking down the silos of sales processes, customer service engagement, and marketing to help understand the customer better.”

Pega Systems

Rupen Shah

Rupen is a change-maker who is leading the charge to open the Pega product suite and encourage ISV partners to join the Pega ecosystem. With this approach, Pega is not only driving digital transformation in the market, but also transforming the company itself.

Lochan Sim

Partner Solutions Director, Global Partnerships

“Helping customers and partners be more successful is a moral obligation of modern technology companies. Tech has never been more impactful, and we have the responsibility to help them grow.”

Worldpay

Lochan Sim

Worldpay has a huge partner ecosystem, and it’s Lochan’s job to figure out how to take advantage of it. Now, his company spends every day thinking about how to make ecosystem interactions more valuable, testing new initiatives that haven’t been done before in any industry.

Brad Smith

Chairman & CEO

“From a social perspective, cloud allows a massive base of users and employees to get involved to create the value.”

Intuit

Brad Smith

In his 11-year tenure at Intuit, Brad has demanded constant re-evaluation of what is working, what’s not, and where the company should be far into the future. This mindset has helped Intuit thrive in the digital economy, tripling its earnings over the past decade.

Jon Stross

Co-Founder and President

“There's so much innovation going on in recruiting technology today. Our view is, if we can be a platform, not simply an application,it allows them to adopt new stuff seamlessly.”

Greenhouse Software

Jon Stross

Jon built the first product prototype at his enterprise software business on paper, proving that transformative ideas in the digital era don’t need to start as code. Today, that product is the fastest-growing enterprise talent acquisition suite in the world.

Thorsten Weimann

CEO

"The digital economy is changing everything. It is a chance for us to create a better world for all of us and our kids.”

Abtis

Thorsten Weimann

To drive digital transformation, Thorsten knew he had to take bold action. That’s why he threw out his company’s classic sales model and completely restructured the business. Today, Abtis has digitized every process across the company, making it faster and more efficient.


The 2018 Digital Heroes Were Honored At Engage, The Digital Economy Summit

2018 Digital Heroes Group Photo Engage