Oracle has appointed Ariel Kelman as Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. He replaces Rupal Shah Hollenbeck who left the company earlier this month. Kelman spent eight and a half years at AWS. Prior to that he spent six years as Vice President, Platform Product Marketing at Salesforce. He will be able to provide insights from two competitor organisations in his new role.
However, he is surprisingly reticent in print and perhaps the absence of vitriolic rhetoric was one of the factors that caused Oracle to consider him. With Oracle already starting to open up with partnerships such as that with Microsoft it will be interesting to see how the company evolves its messaging under his leadership.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
It isn’t clear what prompted Hollenbeck to leave but this is not a knee jerk appointment by the tech giant. Kelman would have had a significant notice period with AWS. This almost certainly would have been exercised as he was leaving to join a competitor. His last significant tweet was back in May, since then he has mainly retweeted. This is the first big appointment by Safra Catz to her leadership team and it is an interesting one to start the year with.
