Brooke Cunningham has the sort of career that could be told as a procession of increasingly imposing job titles. She would probably ask for the conversion data. For 27 years, across Business Objects, SAP, CA Technologies, Qlik, Splunk, Datto, inriver and now LogicMonitor, her recurring subject has been the machinery behind growth: partners, timing, handoffs, operating discipline and the awkward business of proving that marketing did more than make the room look attractive.
At LogicMonitor, the proof arrived as a number. Since joining as chief marketing officer in May 2024, Cunningham has built an outcome-based marketing model reported to influence more than 60 percent of company bookings. It is a strikingly legible result in a function that can disappear into talk of impressions, vibes and very handsome event signage. Her work puts marketing nearer the revenue ledger, where adjectives are expected to bring receipts.
The number also gives away her operating temperament. Cunningham likes creativity, but she pairs it with commercial fluency. She likes a bold campaign, but only when brand, demand, customer, field, product and partner marketing arrive together. Her preferred metaphor is orchestration. A trumpet solo may thrill the balcony; a company still needs everyone to finish on the same beat.
Early cargo
A shipping business supplied the first diagram
Her first picture of business was not software. Cunningham grew up around an international shipping company run by her family. Her grandfather, father, aunts and uncles served as executives. She watched departments depend on one another and saw leadership as a practical family occupation, not an abstract chapter in a management book.
Shipping is a useful apprenticeship for anyone who later builds partner ecosystems. A package crosses borders through coordinated custody. Every handoff matters; a dazzling performance in one port cannot rescue a crate stranded in another. Cunningham carried that systems view into marketing. The work compounds when targeting is sharp, messages agree, timing supports the call to action and every route leads somewhere the customer can actually go.
After earning a business administration degree from Simon Fraser University, with a dual focus in marketing and human resources, she entered technology through Seagate Software. Heidi Rolston gave her that first role. Cunningham still keeps the offer letter. She also still counts Rolston in her network 27 years later. It is a charmingly analog artifact for a career spent selling data systems: one piece of paper, retained because an early vote of confidence can outlast entire product categories.
“If I have a question, chances are someone else does too.”Brooke Cunningham
That confidence took time. Early in her career, Cunningham has said, she tried to consume training quietly and avoid exposing what she did not know. Experience changed the technique. She began raising her hand and asking for help. In enterprise technology, where every new post comes with a fresh alphabet soup, curiosity is less embarrassing than expensive confusion.
The ecosystem years
Partners moved from the side door to the growth plan
Cunningham's early and middle career reads like an atlas of enterprise software consolidation. Crystal Decisions became part of Business Objects. Business Objects was acquired by SAP. She moved through global channel roles at SAP, worked on data management marketing at CA Technologies, then spent more than four years building partner marketing at Qlik.
In 2016 she joined Splunk. Over nearly six years, she led global partner programs, marketing, operations and experience. During her tenure, Splunk's revenue rose from roughly $650 million to more than $2.5 billion. Cunningham describes her contribution through the partner ecosystem, an unglamorous phrase for a deeply social job: align incentives, equip other companies to explain your product, and make joint success easier to repeat.
One company, a much longer bar
Approximate Splunk annual revenue markers during Cunningham's 2016-2022 tenure. Company growth reflects the work of the broader organization.
Datto offered her a first CMO post in January 2022. The fit was unusually clean. Datto sold through managed service providers; Cunningham had spent her career helping partners grow. Nine months later, after Kaseya completed a $6.2 billion acquisition, she had helped manage a transition that included DattoCon and sales integration. A short tenure can still contain a very long quarter.
Her next role arrived through an old connection. Niels Stenfeldt had known Cunningham during their SAP years. After becoming chief executive of inriver, he called her about its CMO opening. She joined the product information management company in late 2022, first part time and then fully in early 2023, with a brief to expand in North America and strengthen its channel. Networks, in her story, are not collections of digital contacts. They are professional memory with a telephone.
“Success in tech is a team sport.”Brooke Cunningham
The 60 percent question
At LogicMonitor, marketing got an operating number
LogicMonitor approached Cunningham while she was looking for another scale challenge at the intersection of AI and observability. The company monitors the digital systems on which other companies depend: infrastructure, cloud services, applications and the noisy signals produced when something starts to wobble. Cunningham saw a familiar combination of data, operational complexity and a partner ecosystem capable of extending the product's reach.
She also saw a chance to change marketing's job description. Her outcome-based model connected activity to bookings and, by her account, lifted marketing's influence beyond 60 percent of the company total. This did not come from one miraculous channel. Cunningham argues that the step change happens when the mix works in concert: aligned messaging, coordinated campaigns, useful calls to action and disciplined targeting. It sounds obvious in the way a soufflé recipe sounds obvious. Execution retains the right to collapse.
The measurement matters because it gives marketing a common language with sales, finance and the executive team. Creative work still has room to surprise. It simply has to explain how surprise became attention, how attention became demand and how demand helped the business. Cunningham advises other women in technology to quantify their impact for the same reason: valuable work is easier to overlook when its author supplies no units.
This is also where her partner background becomes useful. A partner program forces a company to make its story portable. Another organization must understand the promise, see an economic reason to carry it and have the tools to deliver it without a daily rescue call. Cunningham spent years learning those dependencies before the full CMO brief reached her desk. At LogicMonitor, the same instinct appears at larger scale: connect functions around an outcome, make ownership visible and let the customer experience reveal where the handoffs are weak.
Ask aloud
A basic question can clear the learning curve for more than one person.
Count the result
Translate marketing activity into business language and measurable impact.
Widen the circle
Use mentors, maintain peer networks and lift other people as you move.
Useful machines, accountable people
Her AI-first brief keeps human judgment on payroll
Cunningham now describes a personal challenge to become an AI-first CMO. In practice, that means reserving time to experiment, encouraging GenAI lunch-and-learns and hiring marketers who can use the tools to improve output and productivity. It also means reconsidering how the work gets done, not merely adding a chatbot to the old assembly line and congratulating everyone on the future.
Her guardrail is human judgment. AI should help the team move faster and think bigger while creativity, context and responsibility remain with people. That position suits LogicMonitor's own subject. Autonomous IT promises systems that can spot problems, connect evidence and take governed action before an operator spends the night chasing alerts. The attractive word is autonomous. The consequential word is governed.
It also fits Cunningham's long view of a career. She rejects the rigid plan in favor of strategic intention plus openness. The distinction matters. Intention chooses the kind of problem worth solving; openness allows the unexpected phone call, the new product category or the intimidating learning curve to redraw the route.
She passes that lesson to college students she mentors. Take risks before feeling entirely ready. Build a network of peers and advisers. Follow up when someone offers help. Learn how the business works. Then quantify what changed because you were there. It is advice with the polish removed, which is why it travels well.
In 2026, Cunningham was named to the HotTopics Global B2B CMO 100 for a second consecutive year. Her response returned credit to the LogicMonitor team and to their appetite for experimentation. The recognition matters, but her chosen unit remains collective progress. A 27-year career that began with an offer letter now contains billion-dollar company chapters, three CMO posts and a marketing contribution figure that a board can read without a glossary.
The through line is not a title. It is the handoff: family departments moving cargo, vendors helping partners, campaigns supporting sales, mentors creating openings, AI augmenting people. Cunningham's work keeps asking whether each handoff makes the next one stronger. Marketing may tell the story. In her version, it must also move the shipment.