Most technology marketers eventually meet a product that refuses to pose for the camera. Hiro Notaney has made a career of meeting them. Optical networking equipment, connected-device platforms, contract systems and cloud infrastructure are essential partly because they disappear into the work. Nobody wakes up hoping to admire a control plane. They want the business to move, the agreement to perform, the application to connect and the awkward machinery to behave itself.
Notaney's job has been to make that machinery legible without turning it into a fairy tale. Today he is chief marketing officer of Alkira, the cloud-networking company acquired by Lumen for $475 million in July 2026. Alkira lets enterprises design, connect and govern networks across clouds, sites, partners and workloads from one software layer. The product's natural habitat is a diagram. The buyer's natural question is much less technical: what gets easier on Monday?
His answer, across several industries, begins with proof. In a 2022 interview during his tenure as CMO of contract-software company Sirion, Notaney argued that useful marketing starts with real value that separates a product from its competitors. He then added the line that best explains his method: over his career, authenticity had become more effective than hype. In enterprise software, where an adjective can spend a year ricocheting around a buying committee, restraint can be a competitive advantage.
“It is just good business to be trustworthy, which is why customer experience is the foundation of marketing today.”Hiro Notaney, 2022
The first network had boarding gates
Notaney did not begin among routers or contracts. He began in the airline industry. The detail is small but oddly explanatory. An airline sells a visible promise supported by an invisible federation of schedules, gates, crews, weather, baggage systems and maintenance. The customer sees a seat and a time. What they buy is confidence that hundreds of coordinated actions will resolve into an arrival.
He later moved into technology marketing and accumulated experience at very different kinds of organizations: Deloitte and Oracle at large scale; Infinera and Jasper at earlier stages; Cisco after it acquired Jasper; then Agiloft, Sirion and Alkira. By 2005, Deloitte material identified him as director of North America technology, media and telecommunications marketing. His work moved from a broad industry portfolio toward a succession of specific, complicated systems.
Infinera made optical networking systems. Jasper built a platform for managing connected devices and became part of Cisco. Agiloft and Sirion sold software for contracts, the documents that businesses depend upon and few people volunteer to read for pleasure. At Alkira, the subject is the network beneath clouds and applications. These are products with steep learning curves and serious consequences. Marketing them well requires a translator's respect for both sides of the sentence.
The DoorDash years
Notaney joined Agiloft as vice president of marketing in 2017. That year, the company reported 45 percent year-over-year growth, a 200 percent increase in channel sales and a 30 percent rise in headcount. Those are company results, not a personal scorecard. They do, however, locate him inside a business learning to scale while its market was becoming more visible.
His recollection of that period is more charming than the percentages. Years later, congratulating former colleagues after a new investment in Agiloft, he remembered Monday noon executive meetings in a downstairs conference room with mismatched chairs and lunch from DoorDash. Growth is usually narrated in ascending charts. The people living through it tend to remember the furniture.
At Agiloft, he also offered a useful miniature of his operating style. As the company's partner program developed, the team shifted its attention from adding partners to making the existing ones successful. Training increased. Partners learned the platform more deeply. The aim was capability, not a vanity total. It is a distinctly unflashy growth idea: a smaller number that works can be worth more than a larger number that merely photographs well.
When Agiloft refreshed its identity, Notaney publicly defended the decision with a comparison to personal style. A company's visual identity, he wrote, should express what is unique about its personality, capabilities and values. The old identity no longer represented what the business had become. A rebrand, in this telling, was not cosmetic novelty. It was the outside catching up with the inside.
Trust, with its sleeves rolled up
In 2022, Notaney moved from Agiloft to the CMO role at Sirion, another company in contract lifecycle management. He was responsible for global marketing, content, thought leadership and customer outreach. In conversation that autumn, he described the pandemic-era realization that important documents were scattered across laptops, physical cabinets and assorted systems. Digitization was not an abstract modernization slogan. It was a practical answer to the question, “Where is the agreement when nobody is in the office?”
He argued that the larger value of contract software would extend beyond faster drafting and approvals. Mature systems could help companies measure performance against contractual commitments, making sure they received what they were owed. It was a neat reversal: the contract was no longer the paper left after a deal. It became an instrument for seeing whether the deal was actually happening.
That idea sits comfortably beside his view of marketing. Customers will share their experience whether they are delighted or annoyed, he observed. A company should therefore remain close enough to know who is happy and what needs fixing. “Customer experience” often appears in presentations as a polished noun. Notaney gives it a maintenance schedule.
“Happy customers will share their experience and so will those who are unhappy.”Hiro Notaney
People who worked with him supply a complementary picture. In public recommendations, one former report described a manager who provided tools and direction, then allowed the team to do its job. A former creative collaborator called him intelligent, relentlessly inquisitive and thoroughly organized. These are flattering descriptions, certainly, but they line up with the method visible in his public remarks: define the useful thing, equip people to deliver it and avoid confusing noise with motion.
A network becomes a sentence
By 2024, Notaney was marketing Alkira, founded by brothers Amir and Atif Khan to make enterprise networking behave more like a cloud service. Customers could design a network on a visual canvas, connect clouds and sites, insert security services, apply policy and observe the result. The pitch replaces a hardware scavenger hunt with verbs.
Notaney highlighted customer research that measured those verbs: faster cloud-network deployment, faster security implementation, fewer staff hours devoted to network management and faster partner connectivity. His comment on the study was telling. He praised its individual case studies because readers were not left guessing how the numbers had been produced. The instinct was the same one he had described at Sirion: specificity makes differentiation communicable.
The scale around that message accelerated. Alkira reported 1,261 percent three-year revenue growth for 2025 and customer satisfaction of 98.7 percent. In May 2026, Lumen announced an agreement to buy the company for $475 million. The transaction closed in July. Lumen now pairs Alkira's cloud-native control layer with its physical network, aiming to let enterprises manage connections across clouds, data centers, partners and AI workloads in one programmable system.
Acquisitions invite a special density of grand language. Notaney's career offers a sensible defense: return to the customer and the action. Can a team connect something sooner? Can it apply one policy in several places? Can it see the network it already pays for? A control plane becomes comprehensible when it controls something the buyer recognizes.
The long rally
Away from work, public biographies describe Notaney as an avid squash and tennis player. It would be too tidy to claim the court explains the career, but the sports do offer an agreeable metaphor. Enterprise marketing is less a knockout punch than a long rally. Position matters. Patience matters. The next shot depends on where the last one landed.
The through-line from airlines to AI-era networks is not a technology. It is a habit of translation. Every stop involved a system whose complexity had to remain intact while its value became easier to grasp. Notaney has spent decades working that narrow strip between accuracy and attention.
His preference for authenticity may sound almost modest beside a nine-figure acquisition. Modesty is not the point. Trust is commercial infrastructure: slow to build, easy to overload and valuable precisely when the stakes rise. The marketer cannot manufacture it alone. The product has to work, the customer has to feel the difference and the company has to listen when reality edits the copy.
Hiro Notaney's invisible products have changed names many times. His visible proposition has not. Find the real value. Say it plainly. Stay for the customer's answer.