Meet our Executive Leaders

Ajay Patel is the General Manager of Apptio and IT Automation at IBM, where he is responsible for Apptio, Turbonomic, Instana, AIOps, and the like to deliver a comprehensive set of AI-enabled financial (TBM, FinOps), automation, and operations management solutions built for optimizing and managing technology investments and applications in a hybrid cloud.

He joined Apptio in 2023 as Chief Operating Officer to lead corporate strategy, products, global partnerships and customer success. Prior to Apptio, he served as Senior Vice President/General Manager for VMware Modern Applications and Management business unit. In this role, Ajay was responsible for VMware’s strategy, products/services, and go-to-market for VMware’s Tanzu, vRealize and CloudHealth product portfolio focused on modern application development, cloud management and Kubernetes run-time and management. Previously, Ajay was responsible for the VMware Cloud Provider business with over 4100 Service Providers and all major hyperscaler clouds operating under VMware Cloud Provider Program.

Prior to VMware, Ajay led the core middleware business, Cloud Application Foundation, at Oracle. He led GTM for Oracle Exalogic, a middleware engineered system, and Oracle WebLogic, a Java EE Application Server, which was #1 in the market during his entire tenure. He also launched Oracle Java Cloud Service and set the roadmap for Oracle’s private cloud solution. Ajay has over 30 years of enterprise software expertise including SVP at Apigee (Sonoa Systems) and GM for BEA Systems, Data Services business. His prior experience includes management consulting and system integration with Price Waterhouse Coopers, EDS and AT&T.

Ajay holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University of California, Irvine. Ajay previously served as the Treasurer and board member for Cloud Foundry Foundation. He is also a board member and technical adviser to public and private software companies.

Larry is Apptio’s President, Field Operations, and is responsible for driving revenue generation, channel strategy, and sales excellence for the company while overseeing Customer Success and Marketing. Larry joined Apptio in 2009 as vice president of sales and played an instrumental role in scaling the organization and bringing in a broad set of customers across the Global 10,000. Since 2017, he has been Apptio’s Chief Revenue Officer. 

Larry brings more than 20 years of experience building and leading high-performance sales teams in the enterprise software industry. Prior to joining Apptio, he was a vice president of sales for HP Software (via the Opsware acquisition). There, he led teams that delivered hundreds of millions in annual revenues. As SVP of Sales at Opsware, Larry’s customer acquisition and leadership success played a key role in the company’s $1.6 billion acquisition. Larry also spent more than six years in various sales leadership roles at Veritas Software, contributing to their rapid ascent and eventual acquisition by Symantec. Larry was a commissioned officer in the United States Army and holds an MBA from The George Washington University in Washington, DC. 

Allison is Apptio’s Chief Marketing Officer, overseeing the global marketing team focused on driving brand recognition and demand for Apptio’s leading technology business management (TBM) solutions worldwide. Allison brings more than 20 years of experience in global demand generation, market category creation and building high-performing marketing teams.

Allison was most recently the VP of Global Marketing at Anaplan, a SaaS cloud platform company driving orchestrated performance, planning and decision making for the enterprise. In this role, she transformed and scaled a revenue marketing practice and team, contributing to strong year-over-year growth for the company. Allison’s belief in building strong teams and putting customers first has delivered success at her previous leadership roles at Docker Inc., GE Digital, Red Hat, and Corning. Allison graduated from Elon University with a BS in International Business.

Eugene Khvostov is Apptio’s Chief Product Officer, with global responsibility for the full suite of Apptio’s products. Eugene leads Apptio’s Product Management, User Experience/Design, Pricing and Strategy, and Product Marketing teams. With more than a decade of experience leading end-to-end technical product development in a variety of different industries Eugene takes a strategic, customer-first view on product vision, roadmap decisions, and new product investment areas. Eugene is also a Board Member for the FinOps Foundation, a community-based industry group focused on the evolving cloud financial management discipline and best practices.

Prior to joining Apptio, Eugene held positions of increasing responsibility at Mastercard and Amazon Web Services (AWS). He studied at Manhattanville College and holds an MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business.

A seasoned entrepreneur and leader, Sunny Gupta was the co-founder and CEO of Apptio, an IBM Company. Under his leadership, Apptio evolved from a VC-funded start-up in 2007 to a public company on the NASDAQ to a private-equity held corporation under Vista Equity Partners, and now to a critical part of the IBM software portfolio. IBM’s $4.6 billion acquisition of Apptio in 2023 marked one of the largest software deals in IBM’s history.

Core to Gupta’s and Apptio’s success is his customer-first mindset and ability to deeply understand customer and market needs. Gupta pioneered a new software category: Technology Business Management (or TBM), that allowed technology and finance leaders to manage and optimize technology spend and value across organizations of all sizes around the globe.

Until February 2024 Sunny ran the Apptio business within IBM and he continues to serve on the TBM Council (TBMC) board of directors, an independent non-profit body that manages the TBM taxonomy, standards, education, and community. TBMC has over 15,000 global members with most of the global 500 and their C-level executives a part of this technology community.

Prior to founding Apptio, Sunny was EVP of Products at Opsware until its acquisition by HP in 2007. He was also the co-founder and CEO of iConclude, which created the IT runbook automation market and was acquired by Opsware. He launched his first start-up, Vigor Technologies, in 1996, and led its acquisition by Rational Software. In addition to his start-up ventures, Sunny has held senior leadership roles in Product Marketing, Business Development, and Engineering at Mercury Interactive, Rational Software, and IBM.

Sunny currently advises multiple technology companies and fellow CEOs. He is Chairman Emeritus of Apptio and Strategic Advisor to IBM, serves on the board of directors for Gainsight and Securonix (both Vista Private Equity companies), is a strategic director for Madrona Ventures, and is a Strategic Advisory Board Member to the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington. Sunny earned a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of South Carolina.