Leading With Our Customers In Mind
Applause’s approach to leadership is one of reinforcing our core values and partnering with customers to help drive their business forward. That’s why we continue to lead the pack.
Meet Our Executive Team
Chris Malone is the Chief Executive Officer and a Board Member at Applause. Chris joined Applause in 2013 and served as both Chief Financial Officer and President, prior to his appointment as CEO.
Since joining Applause, Chris has taken the company through multiple rounds of financing with leading investors such as Goldman Sachs and Accenture, and stewarded the company through its acquisition by Vista Equity Partners in 2017. Chris has been instrumental in Applause’s growth and international expansion.
Prior to joining Applause, Chris worked at NTT Data, a top five global IT service provider, as the CFO of the North American Business, responsible for financial oversight and operations of a billion-dollar operating unit. Chris took on that role after successfully exiting Keane to NTT Data in 2010. Prior to NTT Data, Chris held a number of leadership roles in Finance, Sales & Operations. Chris began his career at KPMG and is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA).
Chris received his Bachelor’s degree and MBA from Babson College in 2000. Chris serves as the Chair on the Babson College Advisory Board.
As Chief People Officer at Applause, Bradley is passionate about building inclusive cultures, embracing innovation and creating memorable employee experiences. He has helped Applause earn its reputation as a high-growth company by cultivating a diverse culture centered on a PRIDE (Passionate and focused, Respectful communication, In it together, Deliver Applause, Embrace change) culture code. And he has been instrumental in building and acquiring an impressive team of top-notch talent at Applause. Bradley’s efforts have paid off year after year as Applause is consistently recognized as a top place to work both locally and globally by organizations like Inc. Magazine, Boston Business Journal and the Boston Globe.
Along with building a culture of collaboration, Bradley makes supporting Applause’s surrounding community a priority. He spearheads Applause’s charitable initiatives, many of which – like the annual Back to School Backpack Drive, Thanksgiving Food Drive and Hope for the Holidays gift donations – are in partnership with the United Way of Tri-County. Applause’s volunteer and fundraising efforts have been recognized by the United Way with awards including the Live United Award and the Good Neighbor Award.
Prior to joining Applause, Bradley held roles in recruiting and talent acquisition at Monster and Enterprise Search.
Tom Bonos is the Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Operations Officer at Applause. Tom is responsible for driving the vision and execution of the global sales strategy, and leading the company’s revenue generation and customer operations teams. Since joining in 2014, Tom has built the sales processes and infrastructure necessary to grow the company. Under Tom’s leadership, Applause has expanded its global footprint and achieved exponential growth, while ensuring our customers are realizing the value of Applause at each stage of their lifecycle.
Tom came to Applause with 15+ years of Sales Leadership. Most recently, Tom served as the Executive Vice President of Sales for ServiceSource, the leader in outsourced Recurring Revenue growth solutions. Prior to ServiceSource, Tom was a Group Vice President at Oracle, responsible for leading its North American Applications Value Programs. Tom has also held leadership roles at SAP America and Benchmarking Partners/Surgency.
Tom graduated from Lehigh University with a degree in Economics and Geological Sciences. Tom lives in Florida with his wife and children.
Luke is the Chief Growth Officer at Applause. He owns the Go-to-Market Strategy for the company, including its Marketing & Product functions.
With a focused eye on accelerating growth, Luke brings 20+ years of operating experience to Applause from national leadership positions at Oracle and EMC. During his tenure with Oracle, he led sales, business development and customer success initiatives across multiple growth priorities including solution development, strategic customer acquisition and engagement, and customer retention programs. Earlier in his career, Luke held significant roles at EMC serving in various leadership positions across sales and business development.
Luke holds an MBA and a BS from Babson College. He also earned an Executive Certificate in Strategy and Innovation from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Suzanne Glick Gilfix, General Counsel and Vice President
Suzanne is the General Counsel and Vice President at Applause. She is responsible for the worldwide legal function for Applause and its subsidiaries. As a key executive team member, she is responsible for corporate governance and leading initiatives around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Environment, Social and Governance.
Suzanne is a trusted advisor with 20+ years diverse expertise in commercial law, compliance, data privacy, litigation, employment law, strategic transactions, IP, open source software, general corporate matters, including IPO readiness and M&A. She leads an agile legal process driving repeatable processes to minimize risk while accelerating growth and customer acquisition and retention.
Suzanne’s legal career has spanned two decades from large law firm to Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, to co-founding Diverse Solutions Consulting, prior to her EMC and Pivotal inhouse legal experience. She helped lead Pivotal’s growth from launch through start-up, to IPO and acquisition by VMware.
Suzanne has served on nonprofit boards: the Anti-Defamation League of New England; the Tyler Foundation in affiliation with Children’s Hospital; New England Corporate Counsel Association; and The Global Good Fund, mentoring young entrepreneurs.
Suzanne obtained her Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College and JD from Boston University School of Law.
As VP and General Manager of Applause in Israel, Mark is responsible for growing all elements of the business – facilitating growth, increasing revenues, and acquiring customers – in the area.
Mark is an accomplished executive and entrepreneur with more than 20 years of business development and sales experience at Israeli startups and leading hi-tech companies including Oracle, Matrix, and Malam-Team.
Before joining Applause, Mark led Ratio through a successful exit. And with Nanorep, as the VP of Alliances and Partners, Mark built lasting business relationships that helped with another successful exit when the company was acquired by LogMeIn.
Mark received both his Bachelor of Economics and Master of Business Administration degrees from Tel Aviv University.
Christopher Jolie is the Chief Financial Officer at Applause, managing the corporate areas of Finance & Accounting, IT and Business Applications & Systems. Chris is focused on delivering business oversight, strategic financial planning and process improvement across Applause.
Prior to joining Applause, Chris worked at NTT DATA Services, a top five global IT service provider. During his 17+ year tenure at NTT DATA, Chris held several high-profile roles including head of corporate financial planning & analysis, CFO of the Healthcare & Life-Science divisions and, most recently, CFO of the Manufacturing division. While at NTT Data Services, Chris played an active role in the NTT DATA acquisition of Keane, Inc., multiple M&A activities and financial oversight of $500M+ divisions. Prior to NTT DATA Services, Chris spent three years with Deutche Bank in the firm’s international equities group.
Chris received his Bachelor’s degree from Gordon College in 2000.
Lisa Landa is the Chief Marketing Officer at Applause. Lisa is responsible for Applause’s marketing strategy and is focused on driving awareness and demand for Applause offerings.
Lisa brings 25+ years of experience in brand building and marketing for a wide range of technology companies. Most recently, Lisa was the Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing for Monotype. In that role, Lisa was responsible for branding, corporate marketing and demand generation strategy and programs. Prior to Monotype, Lisa held leadership roles at dynaTrace, Arbor Networks and RSA Security.
She graduated from Williams College with a degree in Arts and English.
Heather Levy Sigel is the SVP of Corporate Strategy & Development. She acts as a Chief of Staff to the CEO and has responsibility for corporate strategy, corporate development, and Applause's partnership & alliance channel.
Most recently, Heather worked at Deloitte Consulting. At Deloitte, she worked with Fortune 100 companies to develop and implement strategies to improve organizational performance and efficiency.
She graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Industrial & Labor Relations and she received her MBA from the Tuck School at Dartmouth College.
Rob Mason has more than 20 years of operational, management, and software development experience across many different companies, languages, platforms, and technologies. A meticulous builder and obsessive tester with an eye for talented engineers, Rob’s teams produce innovative, robust software. And, through his own example of hard work and ingenuity, he inspires his teams to reach new heights.
Most recently, Rob was Founder and Executive Vice President of Engineering at Nasuni, where he took the company from initial product concept to more than 10 Petabytes of managed storage consisting of billions of files in a global file system spanning more than 50 different countries and generating more than $10M in recurring revenue.
Prior to Nasuni, Rob oversaw all development and quality assurance as the VP of Engineering at Archivas from 2004 to its acquisition by Hitachi. After the acquisition, he continued in his role as VP of HCAP Engineering, managing the integration of his team with Hitachi’s and supporting the broad rollout of HCAP.
Rob holds upwards of 30 patents including several in the area of test automation. He has a Bachelor of Science degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Master of Business Administration degree with honors from Rutgers University. Rob lives on a Horse Farm in Massachusetts with his wife.
As Senior Vice President of Customer Operations, Leanne implements strategies that drive customer success, retention and operational excellence for North America. She also oversees our strategic practices and global community of testers. Since joining Applause, Leanne has built out account management processes, infrastructure and the operational reporting necessary to scale the company.
With a passion for change management and scaling processes for growth, Leanne brings over 25 years of experience to Applause from leadership positions at NTT Data and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC). During her tenure with NTT Data, Leanne was involved in executing complex, global initiatives spanning business transformation, acquisition and integration efforts, global financial system and business intelligence implementations, as well as operational optimization edicts. She served as Senior Vice President of Global Resource Management, Delivery Operations and Reporting where she improved business processes and systems that drove more effective resource utilization, business controls and cost management metrics across five key delivery centers. Earlier in her career, Leanne was focused on sales and business development, client service delivery and business process and controls consulting at PwC.
Leanne received her bachelor's degree from Tufts University.
As SVP and GM, Strategic Accounts, Chris is responsible for the success of Applause’s strategic account business including strategy, sales, and operations to ensure continued growth and customer success of Applause’s largest customers. Since joining Applause in 2015, Chris has held roles on multiple teams at Applause including software delivery, product strategy, and customer success.
Chris has over 22 years experience with high-growth companies as an operating executive, investor and board member. Prior to Applause, Chris was COO of venture-backed TrueLens, a SaaS data platform. Previous experience includes seven years as a general partner of an early-stage technology VC fund, and operating roles at enterprise software company BEA Systems and Stax, a global strategy consulting firm.
Chris holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Queensland, Australia.
At Applause, Kristin leads our product organization in setting our strategic roadmap. Her organization partners with Engineering to develop features and enhancements to our industry-leading crowdsourced testing platform. Kristin is focused on creating value for our clients by building Applause solutions that address their key business challenges.
Kristin came to applause with 20 years of Product leadership experience. Prior to Applause, Kristin led the product development efforts at EdAssist, a Bright Horizons Solution at Work. There, she instituted a product management practice and led the effort to reinvigorate their industry leading tuition assistance platform. Before EdAssist, she held leadership roles at Brainshark, Deploy Solutions and Webhire.
Kristin earned a Bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies from Northeastern University.
Jan leads as General Manager the European operations of Applause and is responsible for growing the business overseas. In this role, he has been tasked with ensuring that Applause Europe meets its goals around revenue growth and customer acquisition while also ensuring the highest levels of quality and customer satisfaction.
Before joining Applause, Jan was CEO and Co-Founder of Germany based software testing company Testhub which was acquired by Applause in May 2014. So, he has been supporting companies from different sectors to implement and scale innovative software testing solutions for years before joining Applause.
Jan holds a Master of Science degree from London School of Economics and a Bachelor of Science degree from University of Mannheim, Germany.
Meet Our Board of Directors
Think you have what it takes to join us?
Do you have passion, drive and the audacity to think that digital experiences can always be better? We’re looking for like-minded people who don’t stop at “good enough.”