Debi Dowling

At Onapsis, the Boston company that guards the SAP and Oracle systems running payroll, supply chains, and finance for some of the world's largest enterprises, Debi Dowling does not have one job. She has three. She is Senior Vice President of Business Operations, Chief Marketing Officer, and Chief of Staff to the CEO - a combination that would read like a typo on most org charts, but functions as a single, connected mandate on hers.

Put simply, Dowling owns three of the levers that decide whether a fast-growing security company scales cleanly or stalls. As CMO, she sets the marketing strategy that carries Onapsis into the market. As Chief of Staff, she is the strategic partner who keeps the CEO's priorities aligned and gets teams that do not normally talk pulling in the same direction. As the leader of Business Operations, she is the one making sure the daily grind of the company actually points at its stated goals rather than drifting away from them.

Those functions are usually held by three different people. Onapsis handed them to one, and the reason is instructive. Marketing without operational discipline turns into noise. Operations without a market-facing story turns into silence. A chief of staff who cannot see both sides ends up scheduling meetings instead of shaping outcomes. Dowling sits at the intersection on purpose.

A category most people never see

The product Dowling markets is not the kind that trends on social media. Onapsis works in application security for business-critical systems - SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, SAP S/4HANA, SAP BTP, and the sprawling ERP estates that quietly run the back office of global commerce. When these systems are breached, the damage lands on finance, logistics, and human resources at once. The stakes are enormous, and the subject is invisible to almost everyone outside the security team.

That is the marketing challenge in a sentence: make quiet, deeply technical, mission-critical work feel urgent to the people who sign the checks. It is a category where credibility beats flash, where the buyer is skeptical by profession, and where the sales cycle can be long. Dowling's job is to shorten the distance between a company realizing it has an ERP-security gap and doing something about it.

Since stepping into the CMO role in January 2023, she has been credited with redefining the company's marketing strategy, sharpening its brand reputation and deepening customer engagement. Reporting tied to her tenure points to accelerated revenue growth and deal-closure times cut by more than a fifth. Those figures come from company-side profiles rather than audited disclosures, so they are best read as directional - but the direction is consistent, and the pattern fits the way she works: connect the market-facing story to the operational plumbing and the numbers tend to move.

The road in was not marketing

Dowling did not arrive at the CMO chair by the usual route. Her career began in numbers, not messaging. In the UK she spent years at Vodafone, where reporting on her background traces a climb from credit analyst toward risk strategy - the analytical, operations-heavy side of a large telecom. From there came management roles at organizations including Cable & Wireless, Siemens, and Acision, spanning telecom, industrial technology, and mobile messaging.

The pivot toward the work she does now sharpened at Juniper Networks. There she served as Chief of Staff and led business enablement for Global Services and Sales Engineering, with senior roles reaching across Customer Success, Professional Services, the Program Management Office, and Business Operations. It is a resume that reads like a tour of every function that has to cooperate for a technology company to actually deliver - Services, Sales, Engineering, HR, and Marketing all sit somewhere in her hands-on experience.

That breadth is the through-line. Someone who has run enablement understands why a sales team stalls. Someone who has managed operations knows where a plan quietly falls apart. Someone who came up through risk and analytics tends to ask what the numbers are actually saying. Bring all of that to a marketing team, and marketing stops being a coloring exercise and starts being a growth system wired into the rest of the company.

There is a practical logic to giving one leader that much surface area. In a company of a few hundred people moving fast, the gaps between departments are where momentum leaks out - the marketing team ships a message the sales team never uses, operations chases a metric that no longer maps to the strategy, the CEO's stated priority quietly stops being anyone's actual priority. A leader who sits across marketing, operations, and the executive office can see those gaps forming and close them before they cost anything. The value is not in any single function. It is in the wiring between them.

The invisible discipline

The Chief of Staff role is the least understood of the three, partly because it works best when no one notices it. There is no product to point at, no campaign to screenshot. The output is a company that runs on time: priorities that stay aligned quarter to quarter, decisions that get made instead of deferred, cross-functional friction that gets resolved before it becomes a problem. When it is done well, it looks like nothing happened. When it is done badly, everyone feels it.

Dowling has built a career on precisely that kind of behind-the-scenes leverage - first at Juniper, now at Onapsis. It is a role that rewards judgment over volume and trust over authority, because a chief of staff rarely has direct command over the teams she has to move. She has to persuade, connect, and sequence. Pairing that seat with the CMO title is unusual, and it gives her something most marketing leaders lack: a standing view into the CEO's whole agenda, not just the marketing slice of it.

It also changes how the marketing itself gets built. A CMO who is also in the room for every major company decision does not have to guess where the business is heading; she helped set the direction. Campaigns can be timed to product launches that are still confidential, messaging can be aligned to a strategy before it is announced, and the operational cost of a marketing bet is visible to the same person making it. Few marketing leaders get to work with that little friction between plan and execution, because few of them also hold the operational keys.

Trained in Britain, building in Boston

Dowling studied in the United Kingdom, at the Newbury Institute of Higher Education - now Newbury College - and at Henley Business School, one of Britain's established management schools. The transatlantic arc, from UK telecom operations to a US cybersecurity executive team, mirrors the shape of the industry itself: security is a global problem, and the people who lead it tend to have crossed a few borders on the way.

Today she is based in the Greater Boston area, part of an Onapsis leadership team steering a well-funded, Series D company through the demanding work of protecting the software backbone of global enterprise. It is a role that suits a generalist who refuses to specialize - someone comfortable holding marketing, operations, and the CEO's office in the same pair of hands, and confident that the connections between them are exactly where the value is.

The context makes the mandate sharper. Onapsis has raised more than $115 million across its funding history, reaching a Series D, and competes in a category that has moved from niche to boardroom concern as attacks on ERP systems have grown more sophisticated. Growth-stage security companies live and die on go-to-market efficiency: the ability to reach the right buyer, prove value fast, and convert without burning capital. That is exactly the seam Dowling's combined role is built to control. Marketing generates the interest, operations makes the engine efficient, and the chief-of-staff vantage keeps both tied to what the CEO actually needs next quarter.

What she does next will play out mostly out of view, which is fitting for someone whose best work tends to be the kind nobody notices. The measure will be a company that keeps its story, its operations, and its leadership pointed at the same target as it scales - the quiet alignment that is easy to describe and very hard to sustain.

In an era that tells executives to pick a lane, Debi Dowling took three. The bet is that the seams between functions - the places where marketing, operations, and strategy usually leak - are worth more when one person owns all of them. So far, at Onapsis, that bet is holding.