The first machine in Mandy Dhaliwal’s story is not a server. It is a raspberry harvester, rolling through her family’s fields near Vancouver with rows of mechanical claws. Dhaliwal, the oldest of four children, remembers the before and after. Hundreds of seasonal workers once picked the delicate fruit by hand over six to eight weeks. Then the machine arrived. A process that had organized every summer of her childhood changed in front of her.
Years later, she would spend her working life explaining a more abstract kind of machinery: storage software, integration platforms, performance-testing tools and hybrid cloud infrastructure. The vocabulary became denser. The question stayed recognizable. What does technology remove? What does it preserve? And how do you persuade people that the change is worth making?
Dhaliwal is now Chief Marketing Officer at Nutanix, the enterprise software company known first for hyperconverged infrastructure and now for software that helps businesses run applications and data across private clouds, public clouds and edge environments. She joined in April 2022 with more than 25 years in B2B technology marketing. Her assignment was not merely to promote a catalog. Nutanix had moved from a hardware-centered history toward software and subscriptions, while the market’s mental picture lagged behind.
The useful kind of ambition
Dhaliwal knew the field she wanted at nineteen. During a college internship, she watched senior sales and marketing executives build relationships that advanced a customer’s business agenda. The idea of B2B marketing stuck. After Simon Fraser University, she began at a Canadian bank and moved into telecommunications. She has recalled starting her career with a pager, a small artifact from an era when marketing technology meant something much narrower than it does today.
Silicon Valley pulled at her. Legato Systems, a storage-software company, became the way in. EMC acquired Legato in 2003, and Dhaliwal continued at EMC. Those chapters placed her near a pattern that would repeat throughout her résumé: technically sophisticated companies moving through an acquisition, a category shift or a new growth phase. Later came SOASTA, BlazeMeter, Fugue and Boomi. Each sold technology that required translation before it could earn trust.
The route was not a seamless climb. When she and her husband started a family, Dhaliwal paused her marketing career to raise their son. She has described the choice plainly: she did not want to outsource that work and was fortunate to have the option. When her son reached kindergarten, she followed a long-running interest into wine school and earned a Level Two certification from the Court of Master Sommeliers.
On paper, wine school sits apart from enterprise software. In Dhaliwal’s telling, the two worlds share a respect for systems and restraint. She is fascinated by winemakers who use irrigation sensors, temperature monitoring and careful production techniques to preserve a grape’s varietal character, vintage and terroir. The technology matters because it helps the original material arrive intact.
“I am fueled by deep curiosity. I have a need to become a domain expert.”Mandy Dhaliwal
Her enthusiasm is serious without being solemn. Friends sometimes assume that a certified sommelier will judge the bottle they planned to open. Dhaliwal’s answer is to open it. If you like it, drink it. She cares about pairing, climate and occasion, but not about turning knowledge into a velvet rope. A tasting room or vineyard is also one of the places where she can step away from her phone.
That posture - study the system deeply, then make it welcoming - explains much of her professional style. Domain expertise gives a marketer permission to simplify. Curiosity prevents simplification from becoming empty polish.
The story has to reorganize the room
At Boomi, then a Dell business, Dhaliwal led the global marketing team across go-to-market planning, brand, product marketing, demand generation, partners, field programs, customer advocacy, events and communications. The business quadrupled over five years before Dell agreed to sell it to TPG and Francisco Partners for $4 billion in 2021. The experience made subscription growth tangible: acquisition is only the first movement. Adoption, expansion and renewal complete the score.
Nutanix presented a related problem at a different scale. The company’s products had expanded beyond the category in which many buyers first knew it. A brand exercise alone could not close that gap. The strategic narrative had to account for where Nutanix came from, where it was going and why the journey mattered to customers managing applications and data across different environments.
Dhaliwal’s team used research and outside positioning expertise, then worked across product, engineering, sales and leadership. The point was not to let every department produce its own polished description. It was to establish one company and one story. A phrase such as “run anything anywhere” can sound obvious after it exists. Making it defensible requires decisions about product truth, customer language and the perceptions a company is willing to leave behind.
“I’m not here to put our name on socks. I’m here to help move the needle in this business.”Mandy Dhaliwal
The socks line lands because it identifies the old caricature of marketing as a department for promotional objects and decorative language. Dhaliwal began when marketers were closer to “the ad people,” as she puts it. Today her dashboards track patterns across brand, demand, regions, segments and business conditions. The tools do not provide a verdict. They make better questions possible: Where is growth appearing? Which story travels? What changed in the market? What needs work?
By 2025, Dhaliwal was describing integrated marketing as an operating model, not a campaign tactic. Marketing interlocks with sales, product, customer success and the board. The language changes with the audience. The CEO and finance team do not need more marketing jargon; they need a credible account of business outcomes. Customers need a consistent experience from the first contact onward.
Her interest in AI follows the same practical line. She has spoken about putting agents on the marketing organization chart and encouraging teams to experiment. Yet the promised value is not a torrent of automated content. It is more room for strategy and creativity, plus better ways to understand and serve customers. The question is how the tool changes the operating system of the team.
A career you drive yourself
Dhaliwal’s operating range now extends beyond her executive post. She joined the board of conversational AI company Quiq in 2022, bringing enterprise marketing experience to a company building customer-messaging technology. In 2024, she was named to the HotTopics Global B2B CMO 100. She also writes and speaks about leadership, including the progress and unfinished work facing women in technology.
Her advice to women who want to lead is compact: “Speak up, rise up, and drive your career.” It is direct, but her own story makes the sentence more interesting than a slogan. Driving a career did not mean following a preprinted route. It included migration from Canada to Silicon Valley, a pause for family, wine study, startups, public companies, acquisitions and a return to the C-suite. Agency showed up as the willingness to choose the next chapter, then learn its domain.
The farm offers an image for the whole career. A raspberry harvester is useful because it changes the economics of a short, delicate season. It is also visible and noisy. Digital transformation is often less cinematic. Software disappears behind a dashboard. Infrastructure succeeds when customers can focus on their own business rather than the machinery underneath.
That gives a cloud marketer an odd objective: make the consequence vivid while helping the mechanism recede. Dhaliwal’s answer is to connect creative judgment with operating evidence, and product fluency with ordinary language. Learn enough to respect the complexity. Then tell the story clearly enough that someone else can act.
There is a sommelier’s instinct in that formula. The craft should help people notice what was already there. There is a farmer’s instinct, too. Tools earn their place by improving the work. Between the vineyard, the field and the data center, Dhaliwal has found a consistent measure for technology: whether it preserves value, reduces friction and lets people move. The clearest message begins with respect for the work happening underneath it.