PRESS RELEASE 18th July 2024

MarTech Veteran Joins Ortto’s Leadership Team, Accelerating Global Expansion

The appointment comes as the company challenges the marketing automation status quo and sets its sights on global growth. 

18th July 2024 – Ortto, a complete platform for data-driven marketing automation, has announced Eric Holmen as the new President and CRO. The veteran martech executive brings a wealth of experience in growing SaaS businesses and challenging legacy martech platforms.

Holmen’s 25 years in SaaS have been entirely marketing tech focused, innovating new channels that we consider core marketing capabilities today, and which Ortto has combined into a modern, powerful platform. During his time at Splash, an event marketing SaaS company, Eric doubled the business while navigating market challenges including the global pandemic. Previously, Eric was SVP of Marketing and Sales at Silverpop - an early email marketing platform acquired by IBM, SVP of Worldwide Sales at Airship - the inventor and global leader of commercial push notifications, and President at SmartReply - an early commercial SMS leader acquired by Genesys.

"We're thrilled to welcome Eric as our new Chief Revenue Officer. His exceptional track record in martech leadership, both as a CRO and CEO, coupled with his deep commitment to customer success, makes him the ideal leader to drive Ortto's next phase of growth. Eric's passion for the future of marketing technology aligns perfectly with our mission to empower businesses to orchestrate seamless, data-driven customer journeys. His expertise will be crucial in expanding our market reach and accelerating our growth, enabling us to bring our unified platform for customer data, messaging, and analytics to a wider audience of businesses seeking to optimize their customer journey marketing,” shared Ortto co-founder and CEO, Michael Sharkey. 

“I was committed to finding a company with a great culture, large market, seasoned investors and, most importantly, an amazing product,” shared Holmen of the rubric he built to guide his next career move. 

“It took time — six months during which I was advising startups in the martech space and exploring a pipeline of opportunities. When I was introduced to Ortto, I knew it checked every box. It compresses incredible marketing power into the most intuitive UX in the market. It’s the kind of tech that gets audible ‘wows’ during demos, and you only have to read customer reviews to understand how successfully it enables marketers to do their best work.” 

The new appointment marks an exciting new growth chapter for Ortto. In the past 12 months, they’ve expanded product capabilities with AI-powered live chat Talk, grown their top-rated global customer support team, and secured 46 badges in the G2 summer reports.