Press Release

Propel Continues Commercial Team Expansion with PLM and High Tech Industry Veterans

July 11, 2019

Next-generation cloud-based multi-tenant PLM provider ramps sales, marketing, and professional services to fuel customer success and accelerate growth.

Next-generation cloud-based multi-tenant Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) provider ramps sales, marketing, and professional services to fuel customer success and accelerate growth

Santa Clara, California, July 11, 2019

Propel, the platform for future brands, today announced the promotion of September Higham to Vice President of Professional Services, as well as the addition of Bill Aston as Executive Vice President of Sales, Kevin Crothers as Vice President of Solution Consulting, and Suresh Haridas as Vice President of High Tech Industry Marketing. Higham has been with Propel since 2016, while Aston, Crothers, and Haridas join the company following the recent additions of Dario Ambrosini as Chief Marketing Officer and Kishore Subramanian as Vice President Engineering.

Propel was founded in 2015; the same year Gartner's Marc Halpern and Janet Suleski in their research report “Predicts 2015: Digital Business Will Spawn a Renaissance in Product Design and PLM” (Gartner subscription required) stated — “By 2019, 25% of large, discrete manufacturers and formulated goods producers will use cloud-based product innovation platforms for product design and PLM.”

Four years later, we see this prediction as highly accurate with Fortune 500 companies rapidly accelerating requests for the next-generation cloud-based PLM in the first half of 2019. After record revenue growth in FY 2019, Propel is forecasted to grow even faster in FY 2020 as companies continue to embrace PLM in the cloud.  

”We founded Propel in 2015 because we knew the next-generation of companies would choose a fresh approach to product lifecycle management over older legacy systems,” said Ray Hein, CEO. “We are seeing this transformation taking place now, with technology leaders making the move to the cloud. September, Bill, Kevin, and Suresh will help us capture additional market share as PLM catches up to other major software categories that have already moved to the cloud.”

Propel is the only next-generation cloud-based multi-tenant solution that combines the functionality of product lifecycle management, product information management, and quality management into a single solution that helps companies get the right products to market faster. Its unique approach fosters greater collaboration across entire organizations and geographic locations, helping to manage the entire product lifecycle from concept-to-customer.

Higham joined Propel in March 2016 as the Director, Professional Services. She is a seasoned software industry veteran and brings over two decades of enterprise software solutions experience from several companies, including Agile Software and Arena Solutions. 

Aston joins the sales team from Cyara, a leading CX Assurance platform provider, where he was GM, Americas. He is a software industry veteran and brings over two decades of enterprise software sales, operations and field experience from several companies, including Agile Software. 

Crothers joins the engineering solutions team from Pramata, a billing optimization platform, where he was the Vice President of Solution Consulting. His previous experience includes senior positions in technical sales and marketing at Oracle, Agile Software and PTC, which grew from a $2 million startup to $1.2 billion in revenue during his tenure.

Haridas joins the marketing team from Nvidia, where he was the Director, Supply Chain Operations. His previous experience includes sales, business development, and operations at PTC and Flex, where he was responsible for implementing the company’s worldwide PLM system. 

About Propel

Propel is the product platform for future brands. The company helps brands like Desktop Metal, Samsara, and Peak Design get to market ridiculously fast by enabling collaboration across teams, divisions, partners, and customers.

Propel uniquely combines product lifecycle management (PLM), product information management (PIM), and quality management solutions (QMS) into one system, natively built on the Salesforce platform. 

The company is backed by leading venture capitalists such as Cloud Apps Capital Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Signalfire and Salesforce Ventures, and is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA.