The most revealing line in Neelam Sandhu's résumé is not a title. It is a date: 2009. That was the year she joined BlackBerry, when its smartphones still set the tempo of mobile work. The company was a verb, a status object, and a tiny blinking red light that could reorder a dinner table. Sandhu entered through brand and marketing. Then the ground moved beneath the business, and her career moved with it.
Over roughly sixteen years, she worked from BlackBerry offices in the United Kingdom, New York, and California. Her remit widened from brand management and messaging to marketing operations, go-to-market planning, corporate initiatives, and the business operations of the CEO's office. Later came strategic customer relationships, sales, customer success, sustainability, and the chief marketing role. It is the kind of progression that turns a specialist into an operator: not a straight ladder, but a tour through the machinery.
In 2025, Sandhu crossed into a different chapter as Chief Marketing Officer of Vonage, the cloud communications company owned by Ericsson. The products changed. The central problem did not. Both companies asked the same hard question in different dialects: how do you explain sophisticated infrastructure to people who care less about the machinery than what it lets them do?
An education in reinvention
Corporate transformations are tidier in case studies than they are from the inside. A famous device company becomes an enterprise software company; a clean arrow connects the two boxes. Inside the arrow are customers with old expectations, teams learning new muscles, and a brand carrying memories that may help or hinder the next sale. Sandhu lived inside that arrow.
By 2018, she was Senior Director of Business Operations in BlackBerry's Office of the CEO. She described the job as touching every function in some capacity. One day might involve government officials and customers. Another might mean launching an internal expense system or driving a cross-company initiative. The contrast is useful. Executive operations is partly strategy, partly follow-through, and often the unglamorous work of making sure a decision survives contact with the organization.
That vantage point gave Sandhu a view few brand leaders get early enough: marketing promises live downstream from operating choices. A privacy claim depends on the business model. A reliability claim depends on the product. A customer-first claim depends on how sales, engineering, and support behave after the contract is signed. The story can sharpen the company, but it cannot substitute for one.
Trust as an operating system
Trust appears so often in corporate language that it can become invisible. Sandhu makes it concrete. During her BlackBerry years, she argued that security must be built into an architecture, not attached later. She described privacy as a commitment about who owns and benefits from data. As chair of an artificial intelligence working group at the Consumer Technology Association, she pushed the discussion toward ethics and trustworthiness while connected devices were spreading into daily life.
“People have to trust the solutions that they're using.”Neelam Sandhu
This was more than a communications position. Sandhu eventually carried responsibility for BlackBerry's corporate sustainability, delivering its inaugural environmental, social, and governance report and its carbon-neutral status. She also led elite customer success, including strategic relationships, co-selling, and work with product engineering for top customers. By 2023 she held that portfolio alongside the CMO role.
The combination looks sprawling until you see the common unit: credibility. Sustainability asks whether long-term claims can be measured. Customer success asks whether value appears after the sale. Marketing asks whether the market understands it. Sandhu's public formula for a successful leadership team joins the same dots: customer obsession, effective collaboration, and strong technical expertise.
Widening the doorway
Sandhu has also applied the language of meaning to who enters the technology industry in the first place. In a 2019 conversation about women in technology, she pointed to two linked barriers: too few visible role models in male-dominated fields and an education environment in which many young women do not feel that they belong. Waiting for the hiring stage, in her view, is waiting too long. “We need to increase the pipeline of women in STEM and that starts with education,” she said.
Her second point was distinctly that of a marketer. Technology is often presented as rational, cold, and detached from the texture of ordinary life. Change the message to show how technical work improves society, she argued, and a different group of people may be able to picture themselves doing it. This is not about making the work appear easier. It is about describing the full reason the work exists.
The idea echoes her later approach to customers and developers. Access is not created merely by opening a door. People need examples, a community, language that makes the opportunity legible, and evidence that they can belong on the other side. Whether the subject is a student considering STEM or a founder considering a communications API, the principle is similar: possibility becomes useful only when someone can see a path through it.
Sandhu's own path supplies one such example without pretending it was frictionless. She has spoken about encountering bias from men and women, while also crediting support from both for helping her grow. That balance is characteristic of her public voice: acknowledge the structural problem, identify the relationships that helped, and move toward a practical intervention.
Why Vonage
When Sandhu considers joining a company, she has said she tests three things. First is culture: integrity, authenticity, and shared purpose. Second is leadership that is visionary and principled. Third is a reason for being that connects business results to wider progress. Vonage, she concluded after arriving in June 2025, met all three.
The assignment is a rich translation problem. Vonage has roots in internet calling, but its current vocabulary includes CPaaS, CCaaS, UCaaS, AI, communications APIs, and network APIs. Ericsson adds the reach and capability of mobile networks. To engineers, each term marks a real technical category. To a buyer, developer, or founder, the alphabet can collapse into noise.
Sandhu's response is to begin with the consequence. “Marketing is not just about telling the world what you do, but showing the world why it matters,” she has said. In this frame, an API is not the destination. It is a route to a safer sign-in, a useful conversation, a faster workflow, or a service that knows enough context to be helpful. The marketer's work is to preserve technical truth while making the result visible.
“Marketing is not just about telling the world what you do, but showing the world why it matters.”Neelam Sandhu
APIs need company
Sandhu is blunt about one industry habit: APIs do not sell themselves. Publishing documentation is necessary, but it does not create a market. Developers and companies also need clear use cases, viable business models, go-to-market support, and examples that shorten the distance between an endpoint and an outcome. A catalog presents possibility. An ecosystem turns possibility into adoption.
That point matters as mobile networks become programmable. Capabilities once buried inside carriers can be made available to enterprise software through APIs. The commercial opportunity sounds enormous, which is precisely why the explanation must become specific. Who is the user? Which moment improves? What friction disappears? Who helps a developer get from experiment to production? Without those answers, “network API” remains a category looking for a reason to be remembered.
At Mobile World Congress in 2026, Sandhu placed that story inside a broader shift: mobile networks becoming a strategic layer in the enterprise technology stack. Her sessions connected AI, trust, growth, and network API adoption. The combination reflects her range. Growth without trust is brittle. Trust without a useful outcome is inert. Technology without translation struggles to travel.
The shape of a modern CMO
Sandhu earned an honors degree in Business Management from the University of Leicester and later completed an executive certification in financial analysis at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. The pairing suits the career that followed: narrative on one side, operating and financial fluency on the other.
Her industry work has extended beyond the companies on her résumé. She has advised technology businesses, chaired the CTA's AI group, and served on the AFCEA DC board, which brings government, industry, and academia together around communications and information technology. FedScoop named her among its Best Bosses in Federal IT in 2022. Other recognitions have focused on customer experience and sustainability.
Awards are markers, not the story. The more interesting achievement is the career architecture: Sandhu repeatedly moved closer to the place where promise meets delivery. Brand led to operations. Operations led to strategic customers. Customer success sat beside sales and engineering. Sustainability demanded evidence. Marketing gathered those threads into a public account of why the work mattered.
There is a lesson here for anyone trying to communicate complicated products. Clarity is not simplification by deletion. It is the hard work of discovering which detail carries the consequence. Sandhu's approach asks the company to do that work together, from product architecture to customer relationship to public story. The message gets shorter only after the operating system gets stronger.
She joined BlackBerry as a marketer near the crest of one technology era and emerged as an executive fluent in reinvention. At Vonage, the acronyms are newer and the networks are opening in different ways. Her enduring subject is older: how a technology company earns the right to be understood.