Dave Cotten VP Sales, Backblaze

Backblaze, Inc. announced that Dave Cotten and Teresa Dodson joined the company’s sales leadership team.

“Adding these seasoned, senior-level sales leaders reinforces our commitment to delivering open cloud solutions that allow our customers to do more with their data,” said Jason Wakeam, CRO. “Dave and Teresa bring sales experience and a strategic approach to deepen relationships and better serve our customers and partners.“

The news follows the recent appointment of Wakeam as the company’s CRO. Reporting to him, the 2 new leaders bring experience in sales and business development.

“Our strategy to move up market in the customer segment is accelerating with leadership from our new CRO, Jason Wakeam,” said Gleb Budman, CEO and chairperson of the board. “Jason is upleveling key parts of the sales and marketing process with the addition of Dave and Teresa to his leadership team. He’s also making strategic changes to improve our focus on priority segments and key go-to-market motions.”

Dave Cotten brings over 25 years of sales leadership experience to his new role as VP sales. In this position, he oversees global field sales, ensuring Backblaze continues to deliver premier business value to its expanding base of customers across the enterprise and mid-market segments.

An experienced sales and operational leader, he previously held roles at SnapLogic, Cloudera, CA Technologies, Red Hat, and others.

Teresa Dodson was named senior director of partner marketing and alliances. In her new role, she oversees the company’s alliances portfolio and channel partner marketing. She is also responsible for driving joint success across the firm’s partner ecosystem.

She brings deep partner and channel management experience to her new role at Backblaze. With more than 25 years of channel management experience, she joined from Rockset (acquired by OpenAI), where she led the alliances and partner marketing functions and helped co-build joint GenAI opportunities with AWS, Confluent, and others. She also served as the global lead for AWS Partner Network, and held partner development leadership roles at SnapLogic, Five9, and others.