About Us

We believe there is no other way to provide quality sales and marketing insights than with people who have direct experience managing these functions. When combined with our unique research methodology, this experience creates unparalleled value for our clients. SiriusDecisions attracts analysts and consultants who are at the very top of their fields.

JOHN NEESON
Managing Director and Co-Founder

John is an industry thought leader with more than 20 years of experience focused on marketing, product development, sales management, communications and general management for a variety of businesses and industries.

Prior to founding SiriusDecisions, John was chief executive officer of Skila, an ASP provider of business intelligence solutions for the pharmaceutical, medical device and biotechnology industries. He led Skila through a reorganization and capitalization that included the re-architecture of the company's core product.

John also spent 12 years at Gartner Group as a member of the company's senior management team, holding positions that included vice president of sales, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, and executive vice president and general manager of the Technology Provider Group. John, along with Richard was one of the five officers of the company. He was instrumental in helping Gartner grow from $15 million in yearly sales to $800 million through the development of the company's brand strategy and the creation of concepts such as Enterprise Resource Planning, an industry term used today. While at Gartner, John played an active role in more than 25 acquisitions and investments.

John has served as a board member for Jupiter Communications, and a board advisor to ICSA Security, Gartner Institute. He also is the founder of ExecutiveEdge magazine, a joint venture between Gartner Group and Forbes.

John received a BA in economics from Ithaca College.

RICHARD ELDH
Managing Director and Co-Founder

Richard is an industry thought leader in sales and marketing with more than 20 years of experience leading sales and marketing teams in the generation of predictable, accelerating revenues.

Prior to founding SiriusDecisions, Richard spent 14 years at Gartner Group, most recently as executive vice president and officer where his responsibilities included worldwide sales, marketing and events. Richard held other senior-level positions in operations, sales and marketing at Gartner, and spent two years in England as the head of sales and marketing for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

As head of Gartner Events, he was responsible for the initial design and development of ITXpo, the world's most successful technology exhibition, and for growing Gartner Events into what is now the largest technology conference business in the world.

As head of the emerging markets business, he headed a high-risk program that drove $50 million of incremental revenue in just two years and extended the reach of Gartner research to hundreds of thousands of users. He also was responsible for the implementation of a multi-million dollar sales force automation tool utilized by worldwide sales and marketing. While at Gartner, Richard played an active role in more than 35 acquisitions and investments.

Richard also has held sales and marketing positions at Four-Phase Systems-Motorola and Hewlett-Packard. He was an initial investor and operator of Sport Club, a mail-order catalog business, and North American Plastic, a merchant to mass market retail store; both grew to profitability and were sold. Richard currently serves as an advisor and board member to many privately held companies.

Richard received a BS in finance from the University of Connecticut.

ALLY MOTZ
President and CEO, SiriusDecisions Canada

Ally is a senior sales, marketing and general management executive with more than 25 years experience spearheading the rapid and sustained growth of b-to-b organizations. Ally has a high level of proficiency in launching new ventures and developing growth strategies, including market share enhancement, market expansion and new market segment penetration. He is skilled at working with senior executives to identify and align strategic and financial goals to improve company performance.

Ally gained his expertise in formulating business strategy, developing senior executive relationships, consultative selling, and setting up and motivating effective sales teams during his highly successful career in several leadership roles. Prior to founding SiriusDecisions Canada, Ally was country manager for Gartner, where he led the company's Canadian subsidiary to record sales (400 percent growth to 41M), increased profits and world-leading client retention results. During his tenure he orchestrated and executed a growth strategy focused on new product introductions, market expansion, new client acquisition, current account growth, executive-level relationship development and client loyalty.

At Pitney Bowes, Ally was a top performing regional sales leader and the senior project manager responsible for the company's first foray into sales force automation and customer relationship management. As general manager at Carpita, he oversaw the company's successful expansion of large-scale retail operations.

Ally has an extensive network of influential senior-level contacts in Fortune 500 companies, as well as in large government organizations. He sits on numerous committees of key business and industry associations, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and industry association events. Ally is a member of the Canadian Marketing Association’s (CMA) Board of Directors and Chair of the CMA B-to-B Council. He is also a contributing member of the Montreal Marketing Association’s (APCM) B-to-B Council.

TONY JAROS
Senior Vice President of Research

Tony is a sales and marketing thought leader with nearly 20 years of experience; he has led the overall research function at SiriusDecisions since the company’s founding in 2001. His b-to-b expertise spans a wide range of disciplines, including field marketing/demand creation strategies, tactics, metrics and organizational structures; general marketing strategy; marketing communications; and inside sales/teleprospecting. As a consulting principal, Tony has advised a number of organizations including Cognos, Symantec, CSC, Gartner, MasterCard and Factiva.

Prior to SiriusDecisions, Tony worked as a consultant and project manager with Norwalk, CT-based Peppers and Rogers Group (PRG), the world’s leading relationship marketing boutique consulting firm. His work included the creation of business-to-business and business-to-consumer customer value models and needs frameworks, the reorganization of a major airline’s sales and marketing organizations around its customers, the overhaul of a online retailer’s Web strategy, the development of a comprehensive customer touchmap for an automobile manufacturer, and the creation of hands-on, customer-centric sales and marketing training programs and field materials. His client roster included 1-800-Flowers.com, Rockwell Automation/Entek, British Airways, Volvo, Jaguar, Moore Corporation, Ford’s Premier Automotive Group and GE Capital.

Tony also was responsible for the day-to-day project operations of Stamford, CT-based Simba Information’s consulting services group, which counseled such clients as Microsoft, Miller Freeman, RH Donnelley, Ameritech, and Simon and Schuster. While at Simba, he also served as a managing editor and senior analyst in the organization’s New Media and Marketing Group.

Tony received an MBA with concentrations in marketing and management from New York University, and a bachelor of science in journalism from Northwestern University.

JONATHAN BLOCK
Vice President and Service Director

Jonathan has worked for more than 20 years in product marketing, product management and as an industry analyst. While at SiriusDecisions, he has helped many b-to-b organizations expand their traditional reputation management initiatives with the integration of social media strategies and tactics into the communications mix, as well as advised clients on evaluating and choosing appropriate marketing technology and services providers.

Jonathan has also been instrumental in introducing product marketing and management best practices to a variety of software companies throughout his career. Prior to joining SiriusDecisions, Jonathan held product management and marketing leadership positions at a number of companies in the financial services, healthcare and high-technology industries, including Wolters Kluwer Financial Services, Mercator Software and MECA Software. While at MECA, Jonathan played a guiding role in bringing one of the first Web banking solutions to market.

Jonathan also spent over five years at Gartner as a writer and researcher. He started his career in the music industry as a performer and journalist.

Jonathan received a BA in psychology from the University of Massachusetts.

JOE GALVIN
Vice President and Service Director

Joe is an industry thought leader with more than 25 years of experience in b-to-b field sales, sales management, sales operations and sales technologies.

Prior to joining SiriusDecisions, Joe spent 17 years with Gartner, most recently as group vice president, worldwide field operations. In that role, he held global responsibility for field marketing, sales readiness, executive briefings, sales process, compensation and sales technology, including the global deployment of an on-demand sales force automation platform.

Joe also spent four years as a Gartner CRM analyst. In that role, he researched, published and presented on a wide range of CRM issues including SFA applications, architectures and vendors. He also served as group vice president, worldwide sales operations for six years where he pioneered and led multiple sales technology initiatives including the launch of the company’s first sales Web site as well as a sales configuration initiative, a proprietary territory realignment tool, an incentive compensation management tool and the global deployment of a first-generation sales force automation tool. In this role, Joe was responsible for Gartner’s global sales process, and developed the global pipeline and forecast process as well. Joe’s earliest days at Gartner were spent as an account executive, followed by district, area and regional field sales management positions.

Joe began his sales career at Xerox where he spent five years in a variety of field sales roles including marketing representative, account representative and high volume marketing executive.

Joe received a BA in business management from Illinois State University.

MEGAN HEUER
Service Director

Megan is a sales and marketing thought leader with more than 15 years of industry and professional services experience. She has worked both in – and for – organizations to build a wide variety of collaborative sales and marketing deliverables that drive systematic, predictable growth.

Prior to SiriusDecisions, Megan was a consultant with Satmetrix Systems, the leader in customer loyalty solutions and co-developer of Net Promoter, the gold standard metric for linking loyalty and revenue growth.

Megan also spent five years as manager of marketing and sales effectiveness for Praxair, where she worked with the two functions to improve performance in the areas of demand creation, communications, customer research, search marketing and sales optimization/enablement. She was also a consultant with the Peppers and Rogers Group (PRG), the world’s leading relationship marketing boutique consulting firm, where she helped a broad range of organizations employ customer value and needs analysis to develop customer experiences that would set them apart in their marketplaces while maintaining disciplined marketing investments.

Finally, as a consultant with Gartner, Megan worked with software companies on competitive strategy and innovative ways of delivering knowledge to their sales organizations.

Megan received an MBA from Cornell University and a BA from the University of Connecticut.

MARISA KOPEC
Service Director

Marisa leads SiriusDecisions’ Product Marketing and Management (PMM) service, delivering research and advice to help product marketers and managers succeed.

Before joining SiriusDecisions, Marisa spent 12 years with Gartner, most recently as a managing vice president and product marketing leader for Gartner’s High-Tech and Telecom Programs business unit. She was responsible for the launch of new products into the direct sales channel, including sales communication, training and engagement, as well as external product promotion and client communications.

Prior to this role, Marisa was vice president of global corporate marketing, where her accomplishments included launching a new brand strategy and architecting the development of the company’s first customer-centric data warehouse. She also instituted Gartner’s first data privacy policies and processes, and held the title of chief privacy officer.

Marisa’s Gartner tenure also included serving as vice president of marketing communications, responsible for interactive marketing strategy and corporate marketing communications, planning and execution. Prior to that, she directed Web design and operations, assuming end-to-end responsibility for the architecture of gartner.com.

Before Gartner, Marisa spent six years as the global marketing director at Marine Management Systems, a small software company. She began her career at Modem Media, creating online promotional strategies for clients including Ford Motor Co., Godiva, JCPenney and Sears.

Marisa received an MBA in marketing from the University of Connecticut and a BA from the College of the Holy Cross.

ALDEN CUSHMAN
Research Director

Alden has worked for more than 18 years as a market researcher, competitive intelligence manager, product marketing manager and analyst. He has initiated and managed innovative information and analysis capture and distribution methodologies, processes and systems in a variety of business service firms.

Prior to joining SiriusDecisions, Alden held marketing, market research and product management positions at a number of companies in the financial services, media, management consulting and information technology industries, including Reuters, Kennedy Information, Mercator Software and Investment Dealers’ Digest. During his five years at Reuters, Alden was global head of market and business intelligence for the Sales & Trading business division with annual revenue of more than $3 billion. He led key market segmentation, voice of customer, market size and share, go-to-market, and sales support initiatives. Alden also spent 12 years at Gartner as a writer and researcher.

Alden received an MBA from New York University, and a BA in journalism/science writing from Lehigh University.

JAY GAINES
Research Director

Jay Gaines is a seasoned marketing professional with nearly 20 years of experience in a variety of industries. His experience includes team building and leadership, marketing strategy and planning, marketing budget and operations management, demand creation, sales and marketing alignment, business development, product development and management, interactive marketing/advertising, inbound marketing and social media. Jay has held executive-level marketing and business development positions at both well-established and startup b-to-b companies where he consistently transformed marketing organizations to achieve significant and measurable increases in efficiency and effectiveness.

Prior to SiriusDecisions, Jay was chief marketing officer at EDR, a b-to-b information company, where he led all marketing, communications, market research and events activities across the company’s six business divisions. Before that, he was vice president of online marketing and privacy at META Group where he had global responsibility for all aspects of online marketing strategy, advertising, email marketing, Web site development and management, privacy practices and online business development. Jay was also director of business development and online marketing for EDGAR online, and head of marketing development at Times Mirror Magazines.

Jay has been a featured speaker and panelist on a variety of marketing topics including content and email marketing strategies, online advertising and privacy best practices. He holds a bachelor of arts degree in anthropology from Columbia University.

LAZ GONZALEZ
Research Director

As director of Channel Management Strategies (CMS), Laz brings a proven track record of executing successful revenue-generating programs through direct and channel sales. During a career spanning close to two decades, Laz has gained extensive executive, front-line and international experience implementing solution-driven sales programs with OEMs, strategic alliances, distributors and value-added resellers.

Before joining SiriusDecisions, Laz headed up North American Channels for Unipress Software, which was later acquired by Numara Software, a leading vendor of service desk and call center solutions. Prior to this role, he served as executive vice president of sales and marketing at Beast Financials, a Wall Street-based application services provider, and before that he was vice president of alliances and OEM programs at Viewpoint – a digital marketing technology and services provider.

Laz also brings several years of international experience, having led direct and channel selling efforts for Lotus Development in Latin America and later with Baan, a developer of scalable ERP solutions, based in the Netherlands. While at Baan, as regional vice president for indirect sales for Latin America, Laz led a channels team that spanned seven countries and worked with over 40 resellers. He also managed OEM and channel enablement programs with Miami-based distributors and their respective in-country resellers.

Laz began his business career with IBM/Lotus where, during his five-year tenure, he participated in the launch of Lotus Notes and closed sales with industry leading companies in healthcare, professional consulting, finance and the federal government.

Laz attended the US Air Force Academy and majored in computer science at Rutgers University.

JIM NINIVAGGI
Research Analyst

Jim brings more than 20 years of hands-on sales enablement experience to SiriusDecisions. As an analyst in SiriusDecisions’ Sales Optimization Service, Jim’s focus is on helping deliver data, knowledge and insight that our clients need to improve sales performance and drive ROI.

Most recently, Jim was a director with the American Management Association, managing global accounts in the New York metropolitan area. Jim has also led his own consulting firm, helping early-stage, high-growth companies align their sales and marketing efforts to accelerate revenue.

Jim managed sales and marketing organizations for CRM services companies including Claritas Consulting and C3i, and spent eight years with sales performance training firm AchieveGlobal (formerly Xerox Learning Systems). He began his career with 3M/Media Service in Stamford, CT, serving as a reseller for Fujitsu, IBM and Sun Microsystems.

Jim earned a bachelor of arts degree in economics from the University of Connecticut, where he is frequently featured as a guest lecturer to executive MBA program students on the topic of b-to-b sales and marketing alignment.