Cloud-based marketing specialist Unified Inc. scored a major strategic victory this week after hiring long-time enterprise technologist Shawn Douglass to lead its product strategy. In his new role, the industry veteran will focus on leveling the playing field for traditional enterprises struggling to adapt the new paradigm of operations in ​the as-a-service era, a goal he’s been working towards since before joining the firm.

“The smaller and nimbler companies have built their businesses on cloud-based operating models and because of that they have this agility, whereas IT is an inhibitor for the slower, larger Fortune 100 corporations,” Douglass told SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier and Jeff Frick in an interview last year, back when he still served as ServiceMesh Inc.’s chief technology officer. “Eighty percent of their spend is focused on sustaining engineering while 20 percent is on driving growth when the more agile guys are all in on innovation.”

Unified promises to narrow the gap for marketers at large organizations with a managed environment for identifying trends across a variety of channels ranging from social media to the mobile universe and make the insights available to the relevant decision-makers. That’s easier said than done within global corporate settings where passing a piece of information up to the chief marketing officer often involves so much hassle that many campaign managers simply don’t bother, a problem that takes an elastic data-driven approach to address.

As CTO, Douglass will tap into his experience leading the development of ServiceMash’s platform-agnostic cloud management to help Unified scale its software-as-a-service offering for that very purpose. He is also taking charge of advancing the analytics and reporting capabilities underscoring the startup’s platform, a responsibility his earlier stint leading investments in data processing startups and other emerging players for EMC Corp,’s venture capital arm should make easier to shoulder.

“This is a great move and a signal that the money in digital lies with cloud-scale Big Data. It will disrupt agencies and bring social into the big money game,” Furrier commented on the appointment, adding that Unified is now in a better position to deliver a “stack for the marketing cloud, which is only vapor today.” Douglass has all the credentials to change that.

See below for Douglass’ entire interview with theCUBE during a live broadcast from last year’s OpenStack Summit.

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