Friday, January 16, 2009

The Mover

Peter Cousins lands CTO role at Unica

By Amber Gay, Special to Mass High Tech

At just eight years old, Peter Cousins was already immersing himself in technology by learning to write software. While his other fascination, astronomy, held out some promise, he decided that technology was his primary interest and made that field his choice for a career. 

Cousins will be moving his knowledge of technology to the chief technology officer position at Unica Corp., taking on the company’s product strategy and direction. 

“As the CTO, I want to focus on helping to build our On Demand model, among other things,” Cousins said. “We have been a leader in marketing, but the challenge has been increasing our On Demand product. I think this is also an important area to be a leader in.”

He added that he also wants to work closely with his colleagues and lead them to develop quality products that set a standard in the industry.

He joined Unica (Nasdaq: UNCA), a provider of enterprise marketing management solutions, in 2007 and brings more than 20 years of technology and strategy experience to the marketing company. 

“While in this position at Unica, I also want to be involved in our product’s life cycle,” he said. “”I want to be involved in all waves of the product and watch the products grown from beginning to end.”

Prior to taking the CTO role at Waltham-based Unica, he served as the vice president of technology. Before Unica, Cousins was the CTO of Itemfield Inc., which was purchased by California-based data integration company Informatica Corp. While at Itemfield, he helped develop the company’s open source strategy while heading up product design and development. After the acquisition, Cousins took on the role of vice president of product strategy for Informatica. Prior to his position at Itemfield, he served as technology director at Ireland-based IONA Technologies PLC (Nasdaq: IONA), which was acquired by Progress Software Corp. (Nasdaq: PRGS) in September. At the software integration company, Cousins was responsible for being the lead technologist of the new product’s division.

Cousins has also acted as a private partner for companies and he said he has been able to help bring them into healthy revenue.

When he isn’t at work, he continues to explore the heavens, exercising his love for astronomy.

Cousins said he hopes that he can bring the knowledge he has gained throughout his career and the experience he has gained from his colleagues to the CTO position to help Unica grow and continue to keep his customer’s happy, something he said he feels is the most important aspect of any business.