Tasktop Strengthens Management Team With Sarah Elkins, Adrian Jones, John Kapral and Betty Zakheim

To Meet Needs of Rapidly Growing Software Lifecycle Integration Software Firm, Position It for Major Advancements in 2016

VANCOUVER, BC, Jan.13, 2016– Tasktop, the leader in Software Lifecycle Integration (SLI) and creator of the Eclipse Mylyn open source tool, today announced newly hired Sarah Elkins and Adrian Jones as vice president of Demand Generation and vice president of Sales, EMEA, respectively. In addition, it tapped internal executives John Kapral to be the vice president of Sales for the Americas, and Betty Zakheim to become the vice president of Industry Strategy.

The appointments follow the firm’s dramatic growth in FY 2015 as enterprises came to Tasktop for the transformative effect that lifecycle integration has on their businesses.

According to Tasktop CEO Mik Kersten, “Over the past few years Tasktop has built a rock-solid technical infrastructure, to the point where our technology has established us as the undisputed leader in the Agile and DevOps integration space. Thanks to the increasingly critical role that the success of these transformations has to the business, Tasktop experienced two-and-a-half-fold growth in the second half of 2015 compared to the same period in 2014. As a result, we are expanding our leadership team with some of the most talented people in the industry, which will enable us to help even more of the world’s leading organizations succeed in their software delivery transformations in 2016.”

Sarah Elkins

In this new role as vice president of Demand Generation, Elkins is responsible for helping IT organizations better understand the benefits possible through improved software development productivity. Prior to joining Tasktop, she served as director of Marketing Communications for API Management at CA Technologies. She joined CA through the acquisition of Layer 7 Technologies. At Layer 7, Elkins managed marketing and demand generation and successfully built out the company’s sales pipeline to drive Layer 7’s growth in the API management space. Elkins holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing from the University of Wollongong.

Adrian Jones

As vice president of Sales, EMEA, Jones can tap into his passion for helping EMEA enterprises successfully adopt and exploit change. Jones has more than 25 years in high-tech positions, working with large multinational technology firms such as IBM and Oracle as well as startups such as Sleepycat Europe. He has also served at software, SaaS and professional services firms, including Versant Rally Software and ThoughtWorks. Beyond his overall sales expertise, Jones brings an extensive experience in helping customers improve their delivery using Agile methods.

John Kapral

With more than 15 years of experience in both software sales and sales leadership with enterprise software vendors, Kapral is vice president of Sales in the Americas and ANZ. Before Tasktop, he was senior director of Sales at Splunk and senior director of Solution Sales for CA Technologies. Kapral has also served in various sales roles at VERITAS (acquired by Symantec), BMC Software as well at startup Cloakware, which was acquired by Irdeto; and Agent Logic, which was purchased by Informatica. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics-business from Bethany College.

Betty Zakheim

As vice president of Industry Strategy, Zakheim is responsible for helping customers understand the value of connecting their software development and delivery lifecycle though integration. She brings to this role extensive experience leading and building teams that delivered software development and integration tools/technologies. Prior to Tasktop, she served as VP of Product Management and Marketing at InConcert, VP of Marketing and Product Management at CopperEye, and VP of Product Strategy at SmartBear. In addition, she served as director of marketing or product management at Progress Software, IBM/Rational Software, IONA Technologies and Lightbridge. Earlier, she consulted, and served in technical roles as an engineer, UX developer and engineering manager. She holds bachelor’s degrees from the S.I. Newhouse College of Public Communications and is a Tau Beta Pi scholar in computer engineering. She also received a master’s degree in computer science from Boston University.

About Tasktop

Over one million users employ Tasktop’s ALM and SLI integration technology to transform the productivity of software delivery, by connecting the development, testing, Agile planning, PMO and operations functions into a unified software development and delivery team. Tasktop customers are the global leaders in financial services, insurance, government and manufacturing, and include 27 of the Fortune 100, seven of the top 25 banks in the world and four of the top seven U.S. insurance companies. Partners, including CA, HP, IBM and Serena, rely on our independent, vendor-neutral role to connect their customers’ software delivery disciplines via OEM distributions of our products. Tasktop has defined the Software Lifecycle Integration (SLI) category to fulfill our mission to “connect the world of software delivery.” For more information about Tasktop and SLI, please visit: http://tasktop.com

Media Contact:

Joyce Bartlett
+1 781-771-3112
Joyce.bartlett@tasktop.com