Mark Dorsey

Chief Revenue Officer Appian

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Mark Dorsey is Chief Revenue Officer of Appian, the Virginia-based process automation company whose low-code platform is used to build and run complex enterprise workflows, particularly in government, financial services, insurance and life sciences. He joined in October 2024 reporting directly to founder and chief executive Matt Calkins, with a remit covering the entire global sales operation — both the direct enterprise sales force and the partner channel. He arrived with more than twenty-five years of experience running cloud and SaaS sales organisations, most of it at Oracle, where he led both a horizontal cloud sales business and vertical-market organisations in retail and healthcare.

Career Highlights

• Appointed Chief Revenue Officer of Appian on October 11, 2024, leading global sales operations and reporting to founder and CEO Matt Calkins.
• Remit spans direct sales and partnerships together, reflecting Appian’s dependence on systems integrators to deliver large process automation programmes.
• At Oracle, served as Senior Vice President of Enterprise Cloud Sales — a horizontal cloud business — and as Senior Vice President of the Retail Vertical for North America.
• Also led Oracle’s Retail and Healthcare verticals within its North American technology division, giving him experience selling into two of the most regulated and operationally complex industries.
• Immediately before Appian, Senior Vice President of Sales for the Americas at Alteryx, the analytics automation company.
• Earlier executive experience at IBM, completing a career of more than 25 years across cloud and SaaS sales leadership.
• Publicly described by Calkins on appointment as a natural leader with a talent for creating high-performing, scalable teams — the specific quality Appian was recruiting for.

Professional Journey

Dorsey’s career has been spent selling enterprise software to large organisations, and his trajectory runs through the shift from licensed on-premises products to cloud subscriptions. He held executive roles at IBM before moving to Oracle, where the bulk of his senior experience was built. At Oracle he worked in two distinct modes: as Senior Vice President of Enterprise Cloud Sales, running a horizontal cloud business where the product is the same regardless of buyer; and in vertical leadership, as Senior Vice President of the Retail Vertical for North America and as leader of the company’s Retail and Healthcare verticals within its North American technology division. Vertical sales leadership is a different discipline — it requires organising the team around industry-specific processes and regulation rather than around product lines — and the combination is unusual.

He then joined Alteryx as Senior Vice President of Sales for the Americas. Alteryx sells analytics automation to data analysts inside large enterprises, a bottom-up adoption pattern that eventually has to be converted into enterprise agreements, and the role put him in a company with a very different growth profile from Oracle’s.

Appian recruited him as Chief Revenue Officer in October 2024. The appointment was framed as an acceleration hire: Appian had built a durable position in process automation, particularly in the public sector and other regulated industries, and wanted a revenue leader who could scale the go-to-market organisation across both direct selling and the partner ecosystem simultaneously. He reports to Matt Calkins, who founded the company and continues to lead it, and sits on a leadership team that still includes three other co-founders.

Education

Boston University

B.S., Interdisciplinary Studies

Boston College

M.B.A.