Jackie has been instrumental to the success of the North Bridge Future of Cloud Computing study. With Jackie’s involvement, the study has become the industry’s most comprehensive and widely cited assessments of the state of cloud computing. The numbers tell the story: in 2014, we had over 1300 survey participants, 90,000 Slideshare views, and participation from 72 collaborating cloud companies and luminaries. Each of those statistics continues to outpace the previous year, demonstrating that the program is continuously being improved upon and growing in reach. Jackie has had a hand in all aspects of the study’s success, from fostering close relationships with collaborators, to helping me with the study’s content, look and feel, to promoting it for the greatest possible impact.  It is rare that a week goes by without someone reaching out to us to use the survey’s content in some way – it’s a tremendous piece of true thought leadership that the entire tech and especially the entrepreneurial community can use.

CloudBees has been a collaborator in the North Bridge Venture Partners annual cloud survey and thought leadership program for the past several years. As a company focused on on-premise and cloud solutions, both, it has been interesting for us to see the survey results and to be part of such a unique initiative.

The expansion in reach that the program has received each year comes not only from the overall growth in usage of cloud offerings, but also from the tireless efforts Jacqueline Ganim-DeFalco (MarketingRecon) puts forth to fine tune the survey, solicit collaborators to help promote it – and then to make it easy for us to promote. The post-survey analysis is also compelling and, again, the MarketingRecon promotion engine working with North Bridge, ramps up to communicate the results throughout the industry. It is a mountain of work – but it is clear that there is a finely-tuned process behind the project that gets better and better every year!

The collaboration between North Bridge and Gigom involved an industry-leading analysis of cloud computing trends. First-ever comparison of leading-edge and mainstream cloud adoption. Conference and Gigaom Research content creation. Gigaom Research branding.   Gigaom has collaborated as a partner with North Bridge Venture Partners on the Future of Cloud Computing for several years now, deepening the partnership with Jackie’s help each successive year. When I came on board, Jackie helped navigate some significant fine-tuning of the research methodology across the partners. She was our communications hub, and chief project manager, and we would not have been able to improve the project each year without her. The project began as a relatively simple, smaller scale survey written up and presented at a Gigaom event. It has since evolved into a multi-part survey, with live polling, and an extended scope of coverage and detail. Jackie coordinated different partners over time, and kept us on schedule. She also helped ensure rich collaboration and give-and-take among sizeable egos and varying objectives.

Jackie’s relationship to North Bridge and to me personally spanned nearly seven years of collaboration to create and implement a wide range of marketing and thought leadership initiatives – often several happening simultaneously. Marketing in a venture capital environment is unique, involving a careful balance of relationship management, tenacity, and timing in order to be well placed with entrepreneurs and innovators. As the investment climate is constantly in flux – one has to be prepared to change direction and emphasis when needed. To that end, Jackie showed incredible dexterity – dealing with all levels of the firm’s relationships, engendering trust with me and my partners.

Among my favorite characteristics of Jackie’s service to NB was her ability to balance strategy and action, keep to deadlines, source and lead teams of marketing specialists, and leverage her own network to strengthen the projects. The results are evident in the growth of several key multi-faceted programs – the Future of Open Source and Future of Cloud Computing programs plus other significant “firsts” such as the large gatherings for keynote events such as Geoffrey Moore, Andy Jassy of AWS, and Jim Whitehurst of Red Hat, part of my Startup Secrets series at the Harvard iLab. She also strengthened keystone relationships with major partners such as AWS, Microsoft, Gigaom, and over 150 companies to design industry collaborations that made each program a success. An entrepreneur in her own right, she melded well with our portfolio companies, CEO’s, and marketing teams, raising their comfort level while being persistent about their involvement with the programs. As the firm did not have an internal marketing lead for most of Jackie’s engagement with North Bridge, she was particularly resourceful and creative in her approach.