Barbara Holzapfel is a passionate executive with 20 years’ experience driving growth through marketing and innovation in startups and large enterprise businesses, and across B2B and B2C. She is currently the VP of Microsoft Education, responsible for strategy, marketing and growth of the Microsoft portfolio of devices, education experiences and cloud services for the education segment. Prior to her work with Microsoft, Barbara was Chief Marketing Officer at fintech companies Taulia and Addepar.
Previously, she was the Senior Vice President and Managing Director of SAP Labs North America, where she drove innovation strategies in Mobile, Cloud and Big Data, and incubated various new businesses. Barbara held leadership positions at SAP since 2001, serving as Senior Vice President of Portfolio Marketing, driving growth through thought leadership and Solution Marketing for SAP’s solutions portfolio for large enterprises, SMB and across Analytics, Cloud and Mobile.
Prior to joining SAP, Barbara worked as a management consultant in London and Frankfurt, after spending several years working for The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta in Global Strategic Marketing. Barbara holds a master's degree in business administration from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and The University of Saarbruecken, Germany.
She serves as a member of the Board of Trustees at the Anita Borg Institute and is a past Board Director of the German-American Business Association, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG), and SVForum for Technologists and Entrepreneurs. Barbara has been recognized by German Business Magazine Capital among the “Top 40 under 40”.
Vera Bereg is Director, Product Management. She and her team are building, evolving and growing Blackline Safety's IoT products and software/services offerings. Vera is focused on working across teams and functions to gain alignment through collaboration and developing a long-term vision with fidelity around milestones and roadmaps.
Vera is a dedicated leader with over 17 years of balancing business strategy, customer need and technical feasibility. She has worked in a variety of fields including telecommunications, consulting, e-commerce and marketplaces, hospitality, SaaS and logistics. She enjoys creating structure from ambiguity, building high performance teams and creating personalized, seamless user experience.
Vera holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of British Columbia, as well as an executive MBA from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
Scott Boston is a Canadian Chartered Professional Accountant, with over 10 years' experience as a finance leader in oil & gas, energy services and retail organizations. He leads the financial reporting team as we deliver our public company reporting requirements as well as our Environmental, Social and Governance program and reporting.
Prior to Blackline, Scott held senior finance roles at the Dilawri Group of Companies and Tesla Exploration Ltd.
As Blackline Safety’s Director, Technology Operations, Jenna Janes is responsible for overseeing all aspects of project management for R&D. Collectively her team drives multiple concurrent projects that cross our hardware, firmware, and software teams – including updates, enhancements, and new features to our core existing products, as well as taking new product ideas from concept to launch. Prior to joining Blackline Safety, Jenna spent several years working in the media and technology sectors in California, including most recently as Head of Operations for TubeScience and Director of Operations (Business and Product) for Collide LLC.
Elisa Khuong is a Canadian Chartered Professional Accountant, with over 10 years' experience in accounting, finance and audit in diversified industries including manufacturing, real estate and financial services. She is responsible for the general corporate accounting functions across the globe, including the day-to-day management of the Accounting teams at Wearable Technologies and Blackline Safety Europe in the UK and France. Prior to joining Blackline, Elisa was with PricewaterhouseCoopers as a manager in their audit and assurance practice.
Donnovan Simon is Director, Client Success at Blackline Safety where his teams' focus is to be integrally engaged with customers in all post sales processes. Their goal is to deliver outstanding experiences that optimize and expand the use of Blackline products and services.
Donnovan brings to Blackline more than 20 years of leadership experience in technology companies working in customer experience, operations, sales, technical support and more.
Prior to Blackline, Donnovan held management roles at SMART Technologies, Nureva and Zephyr Sleep Technologies here in Calgary.
He holds degrees in Communications, Information Technology and Business Administration in addition to being certified in PROSCI change management methodology.
Blair Svoboda is Director of Quality Assurance. He and his team are responsible for design, customer and factory quality. Blair has over 20 years of experience in manufacturing, working with Sanmina, BW Technologies and Honeywell before joining Blackline Safety in 2019. He moved into Quality Management in 2009, focusing on new NPI process, product validation, engineering changes and RMA. Blair has his Six Sigma Black Belt and is committed to continually improving Blackline's product quality to provide world-class customer service.
Anand Vasudevan holds the position of Director, Data Engineering at Blackline Safety. He and his team are responsible for developing the Data Roadmap and the Data Platform at Blackline Safety. Their focus is on enabling groups across the enterprise to drive strategic business value and differentiation in the product, research, analytics, monitoring, and reporting areas.
Anand brings over 17+ years of diverse experience across consulting, banking, oil & gas and retail industries in the Business Data Analytics, AI, ML and Digital Innovation space. He is passionate about leveraging enterprise collaboration to drive strategic innovation and digital business transformation.
Anand holds a joint MBA degree from Kellogg School of Management and Schulich School of Business and is a Bleeding Edge Award winner.