Salesforce Names Co-Founder of Vlocity as its New President and Chief Product Officer

Salesforce named David Schmaier its new president and chief product officer on Monday. He initally joined the cloud-based software company as the former co-founder and CEO of Vlocity, which Salesforce acquired back in June 2020.

In his new role, Schmaier will oversee Salesforce’s global product team, strategy and vision, with an emphasis on “digital transformation” for new customers.

Schmaier leaves his current position as CEO of Salesforce Industries, a division that was created shortly after the Vlocity acquisition, according to TechCrunch. He brings over 30 years of experience working in customer relationship management (CRM) and industry-specific software companies to the team.

As co-founder of Vlocity, Schmaier helped build 24 cloud-software releases in the six years of the company’s existence. Vlocity was operated as a Salesforce company, and was built on top of Salesforce’s platform, making Schmaier well-versed in both the product and the company.

Schmaier noted in a press release some of the challenges that today’s organizations face because of the pandemic, such as the imperative for companies to go digital.

“There’s no question 2020 was a challenging year,” Schmaier said. “We are operating in this all-digital, work from anywhere world and things won’t go back to where they were, nor should they.”

The rapidly-increasing need for technology-based solutions was also highlighted as part of Salesforce’s strategy moving forward.

“Through this acceleration, our core strategy remains the same: we help companies transform by unlocking the value of their customer data, across their business, to help them understand and act on insights,” Schmaier said.

With a host of C-Suite shakeups and billion dollar deals, Schmaier will have a lot on his hands. Salesforce’s current president and chief financial officer, Mark Hawkins, announced in December he would be stepping down from his role by the end of January, and that Amy Weaver would take his place as CFO.

The two new execs will oversee the plans to buy Slack, which the company announced back in December. The $27.7 billion deal would be the second-largest software deal in history.