Robert McKinney

President, Marketricity

Robert is the Founder and President of Marketricity, a management and marketing consulting firm focused on early stage, growth stage and mid-market companies, as well as entrepreneurs.  He is a seasoned, senior marketing executive with a proven track record of creativity, innovation, and success in starting and growing new businesses by delivering customer value.  Throughout his career, Robert has been called upon to use his creative and entrepreneurial talents to build new businesses and to redirect those that were underperforming. 

Robert served as Vice President of Product Marketing and Management at Centra Software, a pioneer in the virtual classroom and e-learning space.  Here, he guided the organization to re-think its product direction and focus on its core strengths around learning.  This new strategy became the central element of the Centra Summit, the company's user conference, and was eagerly welcomed by customers, partners, and employees.  It also attracted the attention of Saba Software, who later acquired the company.  During the acquisition,  Robert led the product integration team helping to develop a joint product roadmap and portfolio strategy to bring Centra products into the Saba Learning Suite.

Robert was also Vice President of Product Strategy at Genuity, a leading provider of managed Internet services, where he was integral to unifying many disparate autonomous businesses, each responsible for its own P&L, into a set of solution offerings under the Black Rocket^SM brand.  This became recognized as the industry’s first integrated Hosting Services Platform.  These solution offerings were designed to reduce the “time to revenue” for companies initiating eBusiness projects.  This role also included forging new business alliances with leading technology companies including Microsoft, Sun, and EMC.

When Robert first joined the company, he was called upon to form a new business unit to focus on virtual private networks.  In this role, he built the team to engineer, market, sell, and support the service.  An outspoken advocate of the service, he helped establish VPN Advantage™ as a global leader in the space.  The VPN Advantage service was recognized for its advanced design and innovations with the award of the title of Laureate by the Smithsonian Institute.  Because of his success with the VPN offerings, he was also called upon to revive the slumping firewall services business.  The result was a comprehensive set of managed security services designed to meet a demands of far-flung global companies.  These services, marketed under the Site Patrol^SM brand, garnered a number of industry awards and revenues more than tripled during the two year period of Robert’s guidance.

Prior to joining Genuity, Robert was Director of Marketing for DirecPC at Hughes Network Systems, offering high-speed Internet services to homes and businesses via satellite communications.  Here, he forged new relationships with Internet Service Providers to create more cohesive service bundles and provide new marketing channels for the DirecPC service. 

At CompuServe Network Services (now part of Verzion), he led the development of enterprise networking services based on Frame Relay and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) as well as customer network management services.  He oversaw explosive growth in demand for these services. Additionally, he was CompuServe’s representative on the Frame Relay and ATM Forums.

Robert holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of South Carolina.