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Nina Hargus

Strategic Advisor

Bill Walsh

Nina is currently working with companies ranging in size from Fortune 100 through start-ups. She is an Independent Board Member at WSO2, a leader in a new generation of cloud native solutions that empower companies to rapidly innovate digital experiences. She is also an External Advisor in the Bain & Company Advisory Network, a top management consulting firm. As a senior technology industry executive, Nina has thirty years of experience growing and transforming companies. Her passion is the intersection of strategy, marketing, and go-to-market to drive differentiation and growth.

Most recently, Nina led Virtustream, a Dell company, as CMO and Head of Strategy, partnered with the CEO and chartered with the rapid business transformation of Dell’s $300M mission-critical cloud services company, serving top global brands. For 22 months, Nina drove a new multicloud strategy, value proposition and business model and executed key partnerships that dramatically moved the P&L to profitability for the first time in company history.

Prior to joining Virtustream, Nina architected and operated Dell Technologies Global Field and Partner Marketing, a 1200-person organization across geographies focused on data-driven marketing to build brand and demand across customer segments from Large Enterprise through Government and Consumer. Nina rapidly identified talent and built a team that delivered unprecedented results. Nina championed a transformational customer engagement platform that utilized advanced digital marketing technology for personalization of marketing at scale, delivering industry leading demand generation metrics and cost savings during a three-year period that saw 47% revenue growth and global expansion.  She is credited for the tight alignment of Sales and Marketing that achieved these results.

Nina came to Dell Technologies from her position as CMO of EMC Corp. leading Marketing through EMC’s integration with Dell. As CMO Nina led the Cloud positioning and messaging across the EMC portfolio of companies that launched a new generation of products and cloud solutions. She had a long career at EMC that included Product Marketing, Alliances, Channels and heading Global Services Marketing for EMC's $4.5B services arm. In this role, she led the marketing integration and branding of five acquisitions, shifting the portfolio toward strategic solutions and services to spearhead EMC's transformational agenda.

Prior to rejoining EMC as CMO, Nina was the CMO of VCE, where she worked to take the company from a narrow joint venture of Cisco and EMC with investment from VMware and Intel to a true cloud infrastructure company. She shepherded Marketing through an era of hyper-growth, defining a new industry category: converged infrastructure. Nina took an “evidence-based” marketing approach with break-through messaging and an aggressive communications strategy that gained customer, partner, and influencer attention. She built a strategy on an innovative customer reference-led campaign that established new data center success metrics which highlighted VCE’s unique differentiation. Nina was part of the core executive team which aligned the board and partners to work efficiently to build one of the fastest companies to top $1B in revenues with profitability. She was a standing attendee and presenter at all quarterly joint venture board meetings. VCE scaled to a profitable $2.1B business, growing at 45.3% CAGR (2012-2016) and maintained #1 market share, defining a new Data Center & Cloud infrastructure segment that advanced the industry prior to being acquired by EMC.

Nina is respected for her entrepreneurial spirit, authenticity, and ability to drive consensus. She thrives when tackling new opportunities and problem solving. At Dell, Nina was Executive Sponsor for the NextGen Employee Resource Group, building and mentoring early-in-career talent, and was an active member of Women in Action, focused on female empowerment and diversity in the workplace. She is a keynote speaker at business, industry, and academic events. Nina is a graduate of Wellesley College with a BA in Economics where she continues to mentor students and she attended the MIT Sloan Executive Education program. She’s an avid traveler and a lifelong learner.


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