Splunk Hires Salesforce.com Marketing Exec As Its New CMO

Splunk, the developer of operational and machine data management software, is building up its top executive ranks, hiring Saleforce.com marketing executive Brian Goldfarb as the company's new chief marketing officer and Richard Campione for the new post of chief product officer.

The new managers join Splunk as the fast-growing company closes in on an annual sales run-rate of $1 billion.

Goldfarb has been working as senior vice president of app cloud marketing at Salesforce since April 2015. Before that he served as head of cloud platform marketing at Google for three years and before that was product marketing director for Microsoft's Windows Azure.

Goldfarb is replacing Steven Sommer, Splunk's current CMO and senior vice president of worldwide marketing since 2008. A Splunk spokesperson said Sommer is retiring, but plans to stay on as a consultant for an undefined period.

[Related: As Sales Approach $1B, Splunk Makes Its Pitch To The Channel]

Splunk, which initially sold its Splunk Enterprise software for on-premises deployment, has been expanding its sales efforts for its Splunk Cloud service. Splunk, in its announcement about Goldfarb's appointment, said his expertise with marketing cloud software would be a plus for the company.

"Brian has led global marketing efforts at some of the most innovative cloud companies in the world," said CEO Doug Merritt in a statement. "His deep understanding of platform and cloud products, coupled with his ability to grow revenue pipeline at scale, makes him a great fit to lead marketing efforts at Splunk. Brian's experience and leadership will be invaluable as we continue to drive Splunk's expansion and growth."

"Splunk is squarely positioned as the leader in helping organizations create valuable business insights from data and is required technology for any data-driven strategy," Goldfarb was quoted in the statement. "Machine-generated big data is the secret for success in IT, security and business operations, and as more and more companies look to the cloud for their data solution, Splunk will continue to grow in importance."

As chief product officer, Campione will oversee Splunk's product strategy and engineering across the company's entire product portfolio.

The Splunk spokesperson said the chief product officer post is a new position at the San Francisco-based company. Many of Campione's duties were previously performed by Guido Schroeder, senior vice president of products, who left the company earlier this year.

Campione was previously president and CEO at Findly, a developer of Software-as-a-Service talent acquisition applications. Before that he was president of the cloud and business intelligence division at ServiceSource, an executive vice president at SAP, and a group president and general manager at CRM applications pioneer Siebel Systems.

Both Goldfarb and Campione will report to CEO Merritt.