Kathy Contreras

VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Kathy is a passionate marketing and channel professional with nearly 20 years of global experience in defining market and channel strategy and deploying related programs. Her expertise is in devising partner marketing strategy, assessing channel/operational readiness, building global channel programs and driving channel success in accelerated timeframes across strategic alliances, systems integrators, solution/service providers, distribution, original equipment manufacturers, independent software vendors and developer partners.

Before joining SiriusDecisions, Kathy led a successful executive consulting firm that provided channel strategy and marketing services to emerging and established companies throughout California. Before that, she served as vice president of marketing for Abaca Technologies (acquired by Proofpoint), an email security provider. Before joining Abaca, Kathy held global marketing leadership and senior channel management positions at Audatex, Phoenix Technologies, Dantz Development Corp. (acquired by EMC) and Sendmail (acquired by Proofpoint). Kathy began her career at Sun Microsystems, where she held various positions in alliance and marketing management.

With a thorough understanding of channel, partner and multi-tier business models, Kathy has built, led and managed global channel marketing and award-winning partner programs for companies of all sizes. Her strength is in leveraging the power of the channel community and building innovative co-marketing programs and campaigns that are beneficial for all parties. Kathy has global management experience including previous direct management responsibility for Americas, APAC and EMEA regions.

Kathy holds a BA in political science with an emphasis in international relations from the University of California Santa Barbara.