Cristina Greysman, Partner Strategist at Amazon Web Services, was recognized by Cloud Girls, in collaboration with the Alliance of Channel Women, as a Trailblazer in the fourth annual Cloud Girls Rising “Women to Watch” awards announced on April 11, 2019 at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Las Vegas.
The Cloud Girl Rising award was created to honor women in the telecom and IT channel who have shown leadership and innovation in the emerging cloud space as well as to inspire more women to step forward and follow their example.
Greysman was honored as a Trailblazer, a female technology industry veteran who is paving the way for her organization, customers and industry in advancing cloud and next-generation technology solutions. She is recognized as a role model and mentor to colleagues and others at work and the partner community.
In her current leadership role, Greysman is driving the development of a partner ecosystem to sell and implement AWS solutions for public sector customers. She also served as the chair of the Executive Committee of CompTIA’s Advancing Women in Technology Community, where she conceived of and oversaw the launch of AWITConnect.org, an online directory of cloud and technology organizations and resources for women and girls. In its first year, the AWIT Community attracted over 150 organizations, events, media outlets and other resources from around the world into the directory with the aim of giving women and girls a single source destination to enter or advance a technology career.
Cloud Girls is pleased to share more about Greysman in this edited excerpt from her award application.
Give one example of how you have innovated in the cloud space and shunned the status quo.
It is not the “status quo” to leave a safe corporate job for an angel funded cloud software start-up, and yet mid-career that is exactly what I did. I was working in a great job on a great team at an on-premise software company and saw the proliferation of SaaS technology and in-bound marketing tools coming into the market, including Twitter, Hubspot, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others. I decided to disrupt my own career, leave Corporate America, and join an AWS-based start-up. It was there that I learned about multitenant cloud applications, social media/marketing, search engine optimization, in-bound lead generation and many of the other tools that would not exist today without cloud computing.
Share one cloud related success that qualifies you to win this award.
I was selected as the sole US-based employee to live in Dublin, Ireland for 6 months to plant my company’s cloud-focused referral and reseller partner program in Europe. That project resulted in the company’s first European distributor relationship for our cloud services, first implementation of European partners in our partner portal, and accelerated channel sales growth for our cloud services in EMEA.
How have you created a corporate vision for cloud services in your organization?
The conversation to convince channel partners to embrace cloud services is far from over. In a recent job role, I needed to recruit and activate new partners into my company’s reseller ecosystem specifically to sell cloud software applications. As a leader of a team I needed to create a vision as well as execute on plans for how we would find the right partners for our business, evaluate them for cloud resale fit, recruit them into our partner program and most importantly help them generate demand resulting in pipeline. My team and I also needed to create a compelling vision for the partners so that they would want to join our partner program to sell SaaS instead of on-prem software. This resulted in over 40 new resellers, over 50 new referral partners and over $10M in incremental pipeline in the first year.
About the Editor
Tamara Prazak is the Director of Channel Strategy and Marketing for Cyxtera and the chair of the Cloud Girls Communications Work Group.