Top Women in Tech
Google Cloud’s Adaire Fox-Martin Back in July, Google Cloud welcomed the arrival of newly appointed Adaire Fox-Martin as EMEA Cloud President, bringing more than two decades of tech leadership to the role. Michelle Winny, Editor of PCR caught up with Ms Fox-Martin to find out more about how she’s got to where she is professionally, her views on encouraging more women into tech and creating greater channel diversity.
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ighly accomplished at building high performing teams across Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific, Adaire Fox-Martin most recently was Executive Board Member and President of Global Sales, Services, and Customer Engagement at SAP, where she successfully spearheaded and grew the company’s customer-focused teams. Prior to SAP, she held various leadership roles at Oracle. Adaire recently served on the Board of Directors of Equinix, the world’s largest data center and colocation provider. In 2020, she was named in Fortune Magazine’s Top 50 Most Powerful Women International List for the fourth time running. Adaire’s route into the tech industry is a somewhat unconventional one, as she explains: “I started my career as a secondary school English teacher, so you could say my route into the technology industry has been fairly unusual! The role taught me many skills that I hold so valuable today – teaching is the one job in the world where you are immediately, on your first day, the CEO of 30 people sitting right in front of you! It’s your responsibility to organise them, maintain their attention, and inspire. “My journey from there to now hasn’t been linear. Somewhere along the way someone took a risk on me as a non-standard 34
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September 2021
applicant into the IT world and that helped to set me on the path to where I am today. There were a lot of similarities between being a secondary school teacher and my first role as a training consultant. I loved taking the skills I’d developed at that time and applying them to something entirely new. From that first role, I ended up navigating my way through each line of business in a software company, from consulting, to support, to development, to marketing, and finally, to sales. Understanding how the sum of the parts make up the whole is crucial. It also means that I have developed an innate empathy for the people in my team fulfilling each of these roles. Whilst I didn’t recognise it at the time, performing different roles within a business was great preparation for senior leadership positions, though this realisation has come with the benefit of hindsight and was never my intention at the time!”
What inspired you to pursue a career in the tech channel and what inspires you now? Initially it was the challenge of doing something that was so different to the role that I had studied and trained for. Today I am inspired by the potential for a positive impact on the communities we live in and serve.
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