The cloud is one of technology’s tidiest metaphors. It floats. It has no sharp corners, no loading dock, no chiller that objects to August. Greg Richards now works in the less poetic truth beneath it: buildings dense with equipment, kept useful by people who cannot afford to improvise. As chief marketing officer of MCIM, he has to make that physical reality legible to a market dazzled by artificial intelligence and impatient with whatever might slow it down.
His product is operational software for mission-critical facilities. That description is accurate and almost aggressively unromantic. MCIM connects workflows, asset information, benchmarking and analytics so operators can see what is happening across a data-center estate. The desired result is not applause. It is a shift completed correctly, an escalation made on time, a maintenance record that can be trusted, a facility that stays available. Success often looks like nothing happened.
Richards has spent more than two decades learning to sell precisely this kind of quiet consequence. His industries have changed often enough to make the résumé look restless: homebuilding, publishing, restaurants, industrial measurement, public safety, ecommerce, pool service, vacation rentals and data centers. Look at the work instead of the nouns, though, and the motion becomes coherent. Again and again, he has chosen products whose value hides inside somebody else’s operation.
A career built in translation
Richards graduated from the University of Central Florida with a marketing degree in 2003. His early jobs were a useful education in changing context. At KB Home, the object was tangible and emotional. At National Journal, it was information. A contract role in consumer insights at Darden put behavior and evidence closer to the center. He then worked in marketing at Mabey and FARO Technologies while completing an MBA at UCF in 2011.
That sequence matters because it came before the senior titles. Housing asks a marketer to understand a decision that is both financial and personal. Publishing asks for an argument about attention. Restaurant insights begin with what people do rather than what they claim. Industrial measurement adds precision and a technical buyer. By the time Richards entered SaaS leadership, he had already practiced changing the frame without losing the customer. The MBA overlapped with two of those working chapters, first Darden and Mabey, then FARO. His education was therefore doubled: the formal vocabulary of strategy in class, and the daily inconvenience of real markets outside it.
The decisive turn toward software arrived at EnableSoft, followed by PowerDMS in 2015. PowerDMS served organizations, including public-safety agencies, that needed policies, training and accreditation work to be more manageable. Richards moved from vice president of marketing to senior vice president during four years there. A policy-management platform is not bought for the thrill of owning one. Its story begins when the right person needs the right instruction and cannot waste time hunting for it.
One recommendation from that period is revealing because it refuses the usual mist of compliments. A contact recalled getting a call in 2015 from a client who had just met Richards at a SaaS breakfast. His advice was to hire Richards before he returned to the office. The reason: he produced leads a sales team could use. In the small republic of business-to-business marketing, that is practically a knighthood.
“Our customers are at the center of everything we do.”Greg Richards, on joining MCIM
There is a practical philosophy inside both the anecdote and the quote. Marketing is not merely a louder description of a feature. It has to cross a border into another department and still be useful. Sales must recognize the buyer. The buyer must recognize the problem. The product must survive the promise. Richards’s colleagues have described him as open-minded, intellectually curious and unusually productive with ideas, but the memorable endorsement is the one with a commercial test attached.
The operational grand tour
After PowerDMS, Richards established Inflection Strategies and returned to an operating seat at SkuVault. The Louisville company made warehouse and inventory software for ecommerce businesses. Here, operational truth could be counted in stock: what existed, where it sat and how quickly it moved. Richards became vice president of global marketing in 2022, the year Linnworks completed its acquisition of SkuVault.
He next joined Skimmer as vice president of marketing. Its customers run pool-service and repair businesses, where route planning, work orders, billing and customer communication crowd into the same day. The appointment lasted only a chapter, but it preserved the pattern: take a complicated working day and explain how software can remove friction from it.
At Key Data, where Richards became chief marketing officer in 2023, the raw material changed from boxes and service routes to lodging information. The company gave vacation-rental operators analytics on rates, occupancy, booking windows and revenue performance. Richards argued for making data useful to hosts of every size. The word “useful” matters. Dashboards are abundant; decisions remain scarce.
Marketing the building beneath AI
Richards joined Fulcrum Collaborations in April 2025 as its chief marketing officer, responsible for the MCIM platform. The timing supplied a large story and a dangerous temptation. AI demand was pushing denser computing into facilities, which made power, cooling, labor and reliability more urgent. It would have been easy to sprinkle the brand with the fashionable vocabulary of the moment and hope the electricity followed.
Instead, the company moved toward one identity. Fulcrum and its better-known product name were consolidated around MCIM. Working with the agency S3 McMillan, the team rebuilt the positioning, visual system and website around mission-critical operations. Richards said the work improved leads and the market’s reaction. The new message emphasized three absences worth pursuing: no silos, no blind spots and no going it alone.
Those lines reveal a useful marketer at work. A silo is an architecture problem until it delays a technician. A blind spot is a data problem until an asset fails. “Going it alone” sounds sentimental until an operator is juggling old systems, inconsistent practices and a shortage of experienced hands. Richards’s job is to carry the technical noun all the way to the human consequence.
More than one million supported assets, joined to workflows and operating context that people can act on.
MCIM says its software manages more than 6.5 gigawatts of IT capacity across more than 90 countries. Those figures describe the platform, not one executive’s achievement. They do explain the burden on his language. At that scale, a breezy promise can become a credibility problem. Data-center buyers know their own constraints intimately. Marketing must be simple without pretending the system is simple.
In 2026, Richards’s public activity moved with the industry. He discussed the pressure of AI and high-performance computing, the need for clean operational data, and the technician’s need for good information on the first shift. At Datacloud Global Congress in Cannes, the setting may have involved breakfast on a beach, but the conversation stayed with power, demand and scaled operations. Even infrastructure people occasionally accept a croissant.
Order, with room for weather
There is little public evidence of a grand personal mythology, which may suit a person who markets systems designed to remove drama. The available details are smaller and better. Richards lives in North Carolina with his wife, four children and eight pets. That makes a household of fourteen before anyone rings the bell. He likes spending time outdoors with his family, an understandable preference for a place where uptime is managed by the sun.
The family arithmetic is amusing, but it also softens a career full of enterprise nouns. Richards is not presented as an engineer or a data-center operator. His expertise sits at the boundary: learn enough of the customer’s world to name what matters, then build the message and demand system around it. He has kept returning to growth-stage companies, where that boundary is rarely neat and the marketing leader cannot hide behind a polished campaign.
His stated aspiration at MCIM is similarly unornamented: help data-center operators solve difficult challenges and find new opportunities as the company grows. After 22 years, the work is more consequential but not fundamentally different. A homebuyer, a public-safety officer, a warehouse manager, a vacation-rental host and a facility technician do not share much jargon. They do share an intolerance for software that makes their day harder.
So Richards keeps translating. The product disappears into the operation; the marketer brings its value back into view. When it works, the message earns attention, the lead is useful, the customer recognizes the truth of it, and the system does its quiet work. Somewhere, a data center remains magnificently uneventful.