Conversational marketing technology provider Neolane today announced that Suresh Vittal has joined the company in the newly created role of Chief Product Officer and will assume responsibility for the company’s global product strategy. Prior to joining Neolane, Suresh served as Practice Leader for the Customer Intelligence business unit at Forrester Research, Inc. and brings to Neolane a deep knowledge of marketing technology that will drive product innovation focused on cloud-based digital marketing solutions.

In this new role, Suresh will drive Neolane’s vision of helping brands redefine how they engage with their customers across traditional, digital, social and mobile channels. With this role, he will focus on guiding the product direction to reflect the changing dynamics that organizations face today as they move to an insight-led, digitally driven, real-time approach to marketing.

At Forrester, Suresh was instrumental in building and scaling the Customer Intelligence practice. His research agenda focused on enterprise marketing technologies, database marketing strategies and customer analytics. He provided counsel to marketing clients across many verticals, helping them navigate the ever-changing marketing technology landscape and develop data-driven marketing strategies. This experience enables him to bring fresh industry insights and perspectives to Neolane that will help foster the company’s position as the only independent leader in cloud-based, marketing technology.

“Right now, marketers face a number of challenges: an activist customer base that has near-perfect access to information, global competitors and new digital channels that force a re-think of all the old rules,” said Vittal. “Fundamentally, marketers operating in a digital world rely on technology to help them optimize their efforts. This means the stakes are higher than before and software vendors must rethink how they deliver capabilities to the market. It is an exciting time for me to join Neolane and become part of this transformation and impressive team. I look forward to driving change within the company and the marketplace by taking a market-driven approach to building the next-generation marketing platform.”

Prior to joining Forrester in 2006, Suresh spent seven years in various client-facing roles at SPSS. At SPSS, he focused on enabling marketing technologies at client companies and successfully led the implementation of web analytics, data mining, real-time marketing, campaign optimization and enterprise predictive applications. Prior to SPSS, Suresh worked at NetGenesis, a leading web analytics provider, where he delivered web analytics and measurement services to clients. Suresh has an M.B.A. from Greenwich College, The University of Hull in the UK and an M.S. in computer information systems from Bentley College.

“We are thrilled that Suresh is joining Neolane and bringing with him his unmatched industry knowledge of the marketing technology landscape,” said Stéphane Dehoche, president and CEO, Neolane. “By creating the new role of Chief Product Officer, we are reinforcing our commitment to constant product innovation. Suresh will play a critical role in driving our efforts and delivering our cloud-based solution that is designed with marketers in mind. He will also take on the role of educating the market, customers and prospects about how conversational marketing can be implemented and executed and help drive results for forward-thinking organizations.”

About Neolane

Neolane provides the only conversational marketing technology that empowers organizations to build and sustain one-to-one lifetime dialogues, dramatically increasing revenue and marketing efficiency. Born digital, with best-in-class email and inbound-outbound channel fusion capabilities architected into a single code-based platform, marketers achieve results in record time. Neolane is easy to use for both power and casual users, but powerful enough to drive the most sophisticated marketing strategies. Future proof, Neolane has a track record of enabling its customers to adapt to new customer engagement challenges and exploit opportunities more quickly than their competition. Neolane is used by more than 350 of the world’s leading companies including Alcatel Lucent, barnesandnoble.com, Orange, Sears Canada, Sephora Europe and Sony Music. Visit www.neolane.com and read our blog The Cross-Channel Conversation.

Copyright © 2012 Neolane. All Rights Reserved. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders.