Gartner Expert

Marissa Schmidt

Sr Director Analyst

Marissa Schmidt is a Senior Director Analyst for Gartner covering cloud networking. Her expertise includes working with products in data center networking infrastructure, products that can run in the cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), SASE, Edge and Application Delivery Controllers. She works with clients to address and provide insights on product management positioning, strategy and product differentiation and helping clients build and launch competitive products through the full product lifecycle. She has also expertise in pricing on premise and cloud products, SaaS and creating competitive pricing analysis. She is customer-focused with top Enterprise and Hyperscalers network infrastructure background.

Previous experience

Prior to joining Gartner, Ms. Schmidt worked for Citrix as Senior Director of Product Management with full product lifecycle responsibility of NetScaler/Application Delivery Controller product line which includes software load balancing, global load balancing, web application firewall, SSL encryption/decryption, NIST/FIPS/GDPR compliance, SaaS product introduction, and hardware appliances. She also worked at Nortel and Bay Networks as engineering manager and engineer in routing, switches and load balancing. She is an expert in the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model from Engineering to Product Management roles.

Professional background

Citrix

Senior Director Product Management

Nortel

Product Line Management and Engineering Management roles

Bay Networks

Engineering and Engineering management

Areas of coverage

Product/Service Organization and Leadership

Product/Service Discovery and Validation

Product/Service Design and Creation

Product/Service Introduction and Delivery

Product/Service Evolution and Management

Education

M.S, Engineering Management, Santa Clara University

B.S, Computer Engineering, Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo

Certificate Product Management Program, UC Berkeley

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Top Issues That I Help Clients Address

1Guiding product managers positioning, strategy and vision for cloud networking products

2Helping product managers create products with data protection and layered security

3Helping product managers create products that improve network and application performance for on premise and cloud products

4Helping product managers create products for hybrid multi cloud

5Guiding product managers on competitive pricing for on premise, cloud and SaaS products

Latest research and insights