Allison Cerra

With a lifelong career invested at the intersection of marketing and technology, Allison Cerra is a leading expert in how technology is influencing the way we work, live, and play. With more than 20 years of experience leading marketing organizations for some of the world’s largest technology companies, Cerra brings a practical approach to demystifying the confluence of significant technology trends – including mobility, cloud, big data, security and collaboration – and signaling where these forces could lead cultures in the future.

Cerra is the Chief Marketing Officer at Alkami Technology. She leads all of Alkami’s product and corporate brand marketing initiatives, establishing the company as a force in reshaping the modern banking landscape.

Before joining Alkami, Cerra led Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s global field marketing division, transforming it into a digital-first, data-centric organization. She has also served in a multitude of marketing leadership roles with companies including McAfee, Alcatel-Lucent, Frontier Communications, and Verizon, earning recognitions from the Dallas/Fort Worth American Marketing Association, including CMO of the Year and Top Researcher of the Year. She has also been named an Advertising Age Woman to Watch.

Cerra has authored multiple books, her most recent being "The Cybersecurity Playbook: How Every Leader and Employee Can Contribute to a Culture of Security." She co-authored "The Second Economy: The Race for Trust, Treasure and Time in the Cybersecurity World," which explores the incentives – whether for profit, principle, or province – that motivate adversaries to target organizations and how companies can develop effective cybersecurity posture in response. She also co-authored "Transforming Business: Big Data, Mobility and Globalization," which discusses how today’s networked world and its proliferation of mobile devices is driving an eye-opening cultural change in the workplace and shaping the attitudes of the future workforce. In "Identity Shift: Where Identity Meets Technology in the Networked-Community Age," she examines how our Internet proficiency is blurring the boundaries between our virtual and real-life personas, resulting in a startling shift in our behaviors – as parents, professionals, consumers and gamers – and the way we interact with the companies that serve us. And, in "The Shift: The Evolving Market, Players and Business Models in a 2.0 World," Cerra identifies a $100 billion market opportunity when communications networks are used as application development platforms.

In her engaging presentations, Cerra shares with enterprise decision makers how an increasingly mobile workforce and the rise of BYOD (bring your own device) is altering the IT landscape and the workforce culture at large as employees and tech consumers become one and the same. Whether your interest lies in sociology, psychology, marketing, or technology, Cerra examines the impact of living in an age where personal technology rivals that found in the workplace, and an age in which virtually all our personal information and interactions can be available with the touch of a screen. Throughout these explorations, she offers practical prescriptions for addressing the market opportunities that result.

Cerra obtained her BS in marketing and management at the University of South Florida and her master's degrees in business administration and telecommunications from Southern Methodist University.