Carol Carpenter

Chief Marketing Officer Cohesity

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Carol Carpenter is Chief Marketing Officer of Cohesity, the data security and management company that combined with Veritas’ data protection business and now sits at the junction of backup, recovery and cyber resilience. She joined in February 2025 and leads the global marketing organisation under chief executive Sanjay Poonen. Her career is unusually varied for a marketing chief: she has been CMO of two major enterprise software companies, Unity and VMware; she ran marketing for Google Cloud during the years it went from an also-ran to a credible third hyperscaler; and she has been a chief executive in her own right, running ElasticBox until she sold it to CenturyLink. She has also served on two public-company boards, at Couchbase and at DHI Group — a record that gives her a governance perspective most marketing executives do not have.

Career Highlights

• Named Chief Marketing Officer of Cohesity on 18 February 2025, responsible for all aspects of the global marketing organisation, and listed on Cohesity’s own leadership page among eleven executives reporting to CEO and President Sanjay Poonen.
• Joined at a pivotal moment for the company, shortly after Cohesity absorbed Veritas’ data protection business and had to present a merged portfolio — Cohesity DataProtect, NetBackup and Gaia — as a single proposition.
• Served on the board of directors of Couchbase, Inc. from September 2021, appointed while she was VMware’s Chief Marketing Officer, until the database company’s roughly $1.5 billion take-private by Haveli completed in September 2025.
• Was a named executive officer of Unity Software for fiscal 2022 and 2023, as recorded in Unity’s proxy statements, during her tenure as its Chief Marketing Officer.
• Served as a director of DHI Group, Inc. (formerly Dice Holdings), the NYSE-listed career marketplace company, appearing in its proxy statements across multiple years.
• Led VMware’s marketing organisation as Chief Marketing Officer through its shift to a multi-cloud strategy.
• At Google Cloud, where she was a Global Vice President of Marketing, she and the team led the transformation of the business from its early stage to a leadership position in cloud over roughly three and a half years.
• Was Chief Executive Officer of ElasticBox, a multi-cloud management platform, and sold it to CenturyLink in June 2016.
• As General Manager of Trend Micro’s consumer and small business units, grew revenue fourfold over six years.

Professional Journey

Carpenter started in technology marketing at Apple and moved through a series of security and internet-infrastructure companies — Tumbleweed and Keynote Systems among them — before taking her first general-management role at Trend Micro, where she ran the consumer and small business units and grew that revenue fourfold over six years. That move from marketing into P&L ownership is the hinge of her career: it is what later made her credible as a chief executive rather than only as a functional leader.

She duly became Chief Executive Officer of ElasticBox, a multi-cloud management platform, and sold the company to CenturyLink in June 2016. She then joined Google, where as a Vice President of Product Marketing and Global Vice President of Marketing for Google Cloud she spent roughly three and a half years on the effort that took Google Cloud from an early-stage business to a genuine market position — a period in which the company had to convince enterprise buyers that it was serious about selling to them.

From Google she went to VMware as Chief Marketing Officer, directing the marketing organisation through the company’s move to a multi-cloud strategy. It was during this period, in September 2021, that the newly public Couchbase appointed her to its board of directors alongside a former Workday executive. She subsequently became Chief Marketing Officer of Unity Software, the game engine and real-time 3D company, where Unity’s proxy statements record her as a named executive officer for fiscal 2022 and 2023.

Cohesity recruited her in February 2025. Sanjay Poonen, Cohesity’s chief executive, pointed to her leadership in the cloud and security markets and her commitment to customer success; Carpenter framed the company’s proposition around keeping businesses resilient in an increasingly complex cyber threat landscape — the argument that data protection and security are now the same conversation. In September 2025 her Couchbase directorship ended when that company was taken private, leaving Cohesity as her principal commitment.

Alongside her executive work she mentors through the Harvard Business School Women in Technology group and through Monte Jade, and she sits on the Women in Engineering advisory board at San José State University.

Education

Stanford University

B.A., Economics

Harvard Business School

M.B.A.