Astronomer appoints Laura Fagan as Senior Vice President of Marketing

Astronomer has appointed Laura Fagan as Senior Vice President of Marketing, bringing an experienced enterprise software marketing leader into the company as it expands its position in data and AI orchestration.

Fagan most recently served as Vice President of Field and Partner Marketing at GitLab, where she worked closely with the global sales organisation to support expansion into new countries and industry verticals. Her experience also includes marketing leadership roles at Asana and seven years at Salesforce, primarily across product marketing and strategic partnerships.

At Astronomer, she will lead the global marketing organisation, with a focus on strengthening the company's category leadership in enterprise AI and data orchestration.

Building on experience at GitLab

At GitLab, Fagan worked across field and partner marketing, aligning marketing programmes with the needs of a global sales organisation.

Her work supported the company's expansion into new markets and verticals during a period when GitLab reached the $1 billion annual recurring revenue milestone.

Field and partner marketing play an important role in enterprise software growth, connecting corporate positioning with regional market needs, sales execution and partner ecosystems. Fagan's experience across these functions provides a foundation for her new remit at Astronomer.

A career spanning Asana and Salesforce

Before GitLab, Fagan held marketing leadership positions at Asana, including serving as Chief of Staff. Her responsibilities across the organisation added experience in business operations and cross-functional coordination alongside marketing.

She also spent seven years at Salesforce, working primarily in product marketing and strategic partnerships. These roles gave her exposure to communicating complex software propositions, developing market positioning and building relationships across the technology ecosystem.

Earlier in her career, Fagan spent more than a decade as a journalist. That background adds a storytelling dimension to a career that has since spanned product marketing, field execution and marketing operations.

The combination of editorial experience and enterprise SaaS leadership is relevant to Astronomer's challenge of explaining the business value of a specialised technical platform to a broad range of enterprise stakeholders.

Supporting Astronomer's growth in enterprise AI

Astronomer says its annual recurring revenue grew by nearly 80% over the past 12 months, reflecting increasing demand for its fully managed data orchestration platform.

The company develops Astro, a managed platform powered by Apache Airflow that helps data teams build, run and manage data pipelines and workflows. These workflows support analytics, data products and AI applications that depend on reliable movement and processing of data.

As enterprises expand their use of AI, coordinating the data workflows that support those systems becomes an increasingly important part of deployment. Astronomer is positioning its platform around that need, helping organisations manage complex workflows while reducing operational overhead.

Fagan's appointment comes as the company looks to build on this momentum and communicate the role of orchestration in enterprise AI strategies.

Making data orchestration more accessible

Data orchestration can be a technical category to explain to business audiences, even as it becomes more important to enterprise technology strategies.

For marketing, the challenge is to connect the underlying technology with the outcomes that matter to decision-makers, including reliable data delivery, more efficient operations and the ability to support AI initiatives at scale.

Fagan's experience in product marketing, strategic partnerships and field execution brings several complementary perspectives to this task. Her remit will span the global marketing organisation as Astronomer continues to develop its presence among enterprise data and AI teams.

A new chapter at Astronomer

Fagan joins Astronomer at a time when enterprises are investing in the infrastructure required to make AI applications reliable and useful in production.

Her background across Salesforce, Asana and GitLab combines experience in enterprise software positioning, cross-functional leadership and global go-to-market execution. Her earlier journalism career also provides a foundation in storytelling and communicating complex subjects clearly.

At Astronomer, she will bring those experiences together as the company seeks to expand its category leadership and reach more organisations building data-intensive and AI-powered applications.

About Astronomer

Astronomer is a data and AI orchestration company and the developer of Astro, a fully managed platform powered by Apache Airflow. Its platform helps data teams build, operate and scale workflows that support mission-critical software, analytics and AI applications. Astronomer says its platform is trusted by more than 900 enterprises worldwide.

Source: Astronomer's appointment announcement.