WP Engine is Proud to Welcome Heather Brunner as COO

Some of you may have already seen the news article on The Next Web announcing that WP Engine has brought Heather Brunner on as our Chief Operations Officer. Heather comes to WP Engine, having spent the last several years as COO for Bazaarvoice, where she held a crucial role in bringing the company’s technology and customer experience to enterprise clients such as Samsung, Xerox, Carmax, Cisco, HP, and New Balance.

As a company, we’re incredibly excited to bring Heather on board as part of WP Engine’s leadership team to help grow and mature the company. She brings deep experience with large companies, enterprises, and innovative SMBs, all of which encompass part of WP Engine’s rapidly growing customer base.

For the past 10 years, the WordPress Community has known how valuable and versatile the open-source software project is. Recently, several influential members of the Community have even written posts and tweeted about the value of WordPress for large organizations.

As Heather joins WP Engine, the entire WordPress Community can confidently say that WordPress is well on its way to becoming a foundation of the Internet in the next 10 years of its existence.

WordPress Growth and WP Engine Growth

WP Engine clients include Google, GAP, McKesson, AllState, Foursquare, Soundcloud, Asana, Twilio, local governments from San Francisco and Seattle, various banks, and others. We hope this list will continue to grow as more and more companies adopt WordPress.

Of course, the Next Web piece mentions an IPO, which is one of those amazing events that happens to a certain type of company, like Bazaarvoice and Facebook and Eloqua. A WP Engine IPO would be a first for the WordPress space, and perhaps we’ll get there one day, but too much talk brings a lot of speculation when there is a lot of work yet to do.

WP Engine has had the opportunity to grow quickly over the past several months. As part of that growth, the company is excited to bring on new executive leadership with the capability to help WP Engine take important next steps in its growth, as a business, as a growing community and culture of employees, and as a member of the WordPress Community.

Focus on customer experience

Heather joins Nick Daines, VP of WordPress Support, who was one of the key players who helped create Rackspace’s Fanatical Support Program, and is leading the growth of WP Engine’s support team of WordPress experts. Expert WordPress support is something WP Engine will always continue to invest in heavily.

Heather helped bring Bazaarvoice successfully through their IPO, in no small part because of her ability to ensure that the original culture of Bazaarvoice grew with the company.

Heather is joining WP Engine precisely because her values are aligned with the culture and values of WP Engine. And WP Engine has grown out of the open-source values of WordPress.

WP Engine is company we are today because of our continued involvement and support of the WordPress Community and every individual designer, developer, and business using WordPress to serve their clients.

I believe that WP Engine will continue to grow as long as our values continue to stay consistent with those of the Community.

As we’ve said many times, WordPress is a mature platform, and ready for even wider adoption. All of us at WP Engine are incredibly excited about the opportunity to be part of bringing the power and benefit of WordPress into this new arena.

We’d love for you all to join us as we welcome Heather to the company, and into the WordPress Community. We’re incredibly excited about what comes next.

-Ben, Jason, Heather & the rest of the WP Engine team