Meet our Executive Leaders

A seasoned entrepreneur and leader, Sunny Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Apptio, an IBM Company. Under his leadership, Apptio has evolved from a VC-funded start-up in 2007 to a public company on the NASDAQ to a private-equity held corporation under Vista Equity Partners, and now to a critical part of the IBM software portfolio. IBM’s $4.6 billion acquisition of Apptio in 2023 marked one of the largest software deals in IBM’s history.

Core to Gupta’s and Apptio’s success is his customer-first mindset and ability to deeply understand customer and market needs. Gupta pioneered a new software category: Technology Business Management (or TBM), that allowed technology and finance leaders to manage and optimize technology spend and value across organizations of all sizes around the globe.

Today, he runs the Apptio business within IBM and serves on the TBM Council (TBMC) board of directors, an independent non-profit body that manages the TBM taxonomy, standards, education, and community. TBMC has over 15,000 global members with most of the global 500 and their C-level executives a part of this technology community.

Prior to founding Apptio, Sunny was EVP of Products at Opsware until its acquisition by HP in 2007. He was also the co-founder and CEO of iConclude, which created the IT runbook automation market and was acquired by Opsware. He launched his first start-up, Vigor Technologies, in 1996, and led its acquisition by Rational Software. In addition to his start-up ventures, Sunny has held senior leadership roles in Product Marketing, Business Development, and Engineering at Mercury Interactive, Rational Software, and IBM.

Among his many accolades, Sunny was selected as a “Top 40 CEO Under 40” and recognized as an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of The Year 2012 for the Pacific Northwest. Sunny was named to the prestigious Puget Sound Business Journal Power 100 list in both 2020 and 2021.

Sunny currently advises multiple technology companies and fellow CEOs. He serves on the board of directors for Gainsight and Securonix (both Vista Private Equity companies), is a strategic director for Madrona Ventures, and is a Strategic Advisory Board Member to the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington. Sunny earned a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of South Carolina (Now Coastal Carolina University). An active alum and donor to the university, CCU recently named the Gupta College of Science in his honor.

Kurt is the co-founder and CFO at Apptio. With more than 20 years of financial and operational management experience, Kurt has led Apptio through key milestones and achievements, which include raising $136M in venture capital, taking the company public in 2016 with a $110M IPO, executing a $144M convertible note offering in 2018 and closing an acquisition deal with Vista Equity Partners to take the company private in 2019. In addition, through his leadership Apptio has continued to expand globally and has acquired a number of high-profile companies in the cloud space. As the CFO, Kurt oversees several key departments across the business including Accounting, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, IT and Facilities.

Prior to co-founding Apptio, Kurt was the CFO at iConclude Co., where he was instrumental in completing the successful sale of iConclude to Opsware in 2007. Before that, he was the VP of Finance at Pacific Edge Software where he led fundraising efforts that secured more than $40M in venture equity and debt financing. Kurt’s tenure at Pacific Edge culminated in the sale of the company to Serena Software. Kurt began his career at Ernst & Young and holds a BA in Business Administration from the University of Washington.

Larry is Apptio’s President, Field Operations, and is responsible for driving revenue generation, channel strategy, and sales excellence for the company while overseeing Customer Success and Marketing. Larry joined Apptio in 2009 as vice president of sales and played an instrumental role in scaling the organization and bringing in a broad set of customers across the Global 10,000. Since 2017, he has been Apptio’s Chief Revenue Officer. 

Larry brings more than 20 years of experience building and leading high-performance sales teams in the enterprise software industry. Prior to joining Apptio, he was a vice president of sales for HP Software (via the Opsware acquisition). There, he led teams that delivered hundreds of millions in annual revenues. As SVP of Sales at Opsware, Larry’s customer acquisition and leadership success played a key role in the company’s $1.6 billion acquisition. Larry also spent more than six years in various sales leadership roles at Veritas Software, contributing to their rapid ascent and eventual acquisition by Symantec. Larry was a commissioned officer in the United States Army and holds an MBA from The George Washington University in Washington, DC. 

Allison is Apptio’s Chief Marketing Officer, overseeing the global marketing team focused on driving brand recognition and demand for Apptio’s leading technology business management (TBM) solutions worldwide. Allison brings more than 20 years of experience in global demand generation, market category creation and building high-performing marketing teams.

Allison was most recently the VP of Global Marketing at Anaplan, a SaaS cloud platform company driving orchestrated performance, planning and decision making for the enterprise. In this role, she transformed and scaled a revenue marketing practice and team, contributing to strong year-over-year growth for the company. Allison’s belief in building strong teams and putting customers first has delivered success at her previous leadership roles at Docker Inc., GE Digital, Red Hat, and Corning. Allison graduated from Elon University with a BS in International Business.

Missy is Apptio’s Chief People Officer, overseeing the global human resources operation focused on driving operational excellence, attraction of diverse talent, world-class employee experience and engagement, and strong leadership development throughout the organization. This role recognizes that people are Apptio’s greatest asset and Missy ensures that the company has the proper programs and operations in place to create an environment that enables Apptio’s passionate and innovative employees to bring their authentic selves to work every day to create wildly successful customers.

With more than 20 years of dynamic human resource and talent management experience, Missy possesses a true passion for the HR discipline. At Apptio, Missy has grown from being a Lead Recruiter to overseeing the global recruiting team and now leads the global HR organization. Prior to joining Apptio, Missy was a Senior Technical Recruiter for Amazon and Microsoft.

Missy is passionate about skills, training, and support and believes that they are key to ensuring every employee is successful. She holds a BS from Oglethorpe University.

Toyan is Apptio’s Executive Vice President of Sales, Americas. In her role, she is responsible for all revenue in the Americas including Sales and Account Management.

Toyan brings more than 25 years of experience in new business sales, account management, market category creation and scaling high-performing teams at fast growing companies.

Joining Apptio in 2013, she was quickly promoted and has served in various leadership roles including EVP, Global Account Management and Strategy with an emphasis on customer retention and revenue growth. Most recently, Toyan served as Chief Customer Officer and remains on Apptio’s executive leadership team.

Regarded as a thought leader in the Cloud and SaaS solutions market, Toyan has held prior leadership roles at Accenture, newScale (acquired by Cisco), Kronos, and USi (acquired by AT&T).

Toyan has a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Marketing from Bowie State University.

Eugene Khvostov is Apptio’s Chief Product Officer, with global responsibility for the full suite of Apptio’s products. Eugene leads Apptio’s Product Management, User Experience/Design, Pricing and Strategy, and Product Marketing teams. With more than a decade of experience leading end-to-end technical product development in a variety of different industries Eugene takes a strategic, customer-first view on product vision, roadmap decisions, and new product investment areas. Eugene is also a Board Member for the FinOps Foundation, a community-based industry group focused on the evolving cloud financial management discipline and best practices.

Prior to joining Apptio, Eugene held positions of increasing responsibility at Mastercard and Amazon Web Services (AWS). He studied at Manhattanville College and holds an MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Jeremy Ung is Apptio’s Chief Technology Officer, leading the Engineering, Operations, and Global Support teams. With almost 20 years of experience in software engineering across development, product management and engineering management, Jeremy is not only skilled at the technical side of this work, but also takes a people-centric approach to managing large global teams. He ensures his team is modernizing and transforming development processes, practices, and technologies to enable greater scale, agility, and customer value. As an active member of Apptio Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) parenting and Asian American groups, Jeremy is passionate about cultivating a positive team culture and an inclusive atmosphere.

Before joining Apptio in 2019, he spent three years in different management positions at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud platform. Prior to that, he worked at Microsoft and MDA.

Ajay Patel joined Apptio in 2023 as Chief Operating Officer to lead corporate strategy, products, global partnerships and customer success. Most recently he was Senior Vice President/General Manager for VMware Modern Applications and Management business unit. In this role, Ajay was responsible for VMware’s strategy, products/services, and go-to-market for VMware’s Tanzu, vRealize and CloudHealth product portfolio focused on modern application development, application modernization, cloud management and Kubernetes run-time and management. Previously, Ajay was responsible for the VMware Cloud Provider business with over 4100 Service Providers and all major hyperscaler clouds operating under VMware Cloud Provider Program.

Prior to VMware, Ajay led the core middleware business, Cloud Application Foundation, at Oracle. He led Oracle Exalogic, a middleware engineered system, and Oracle WebLogic, a Java EE Application Server, which was #1 in the market during his entire tenure. He also launched Oracle Java Cloud Service and set the roadmap for Oracle’s private cloud solution. Ajay has over 30 years of enterprise software expertise including SVP at Apigee (Sonoa Systems) and GM for BEA Systems, Data Services business. His prior experience includes management consulting and system integration with Price Waterhouse Coopers, EDS and AT&T.

Ajay holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University of California, Irvine. Ajay previously served as the Treasurer and board member for Cloud Foundry Foundation. He is also a board member and technical adviser to several private & venture funded software companies.

Margaret Dawson is Chief of Staff to the CEO and Communications Officer. A 25-year tech industry veteran, Margaret brings proven, global success at leading corporate communications, product marketing, product management, diversity & inclusion, and overall go-to-market strategy for both emerging and Fortune 500 companies. In all of her roles, Margaret takes a customer-centric approach, while establishing differentiated go-to-market programs that break through crowded markets and drive category share and revenue growth.

Prior to joining Apptio, Margaret was most recently Chief of Staff to the CEO at Red Hat. She has held global leadership roles at both emerging and Fortune 500 companies, using her entrepreneurship and collaborative leadership style to drive new global initiatives, including cloud at HPE, network security at Microsoft, international e-commerce at Amazon.com, and portfolio product strategy at Red Hat.

Margaret is an acclaimed author and speaker on digital disruption, emerging technologies, cloud computing, and the convergence of business and technology. Ranked as one of the top Women in Cloud Computing, she was also named Business Role Model of the Year for Women in IT, and Mentor and Coach of the Year in the Stevie Business Awards. Margaret has worked and traveled extensively in Asia, Europe, and North America. She is an advisor to multiple cloud and technology organizations and early-stage companies and CEOs.

In her spare time, she loves mothering her now-grown five children and two dogs and spending time with her fellow tech-geek husband at their home outside Seattle, WA.