Vaishali Ghiya ─ Bridging business and technology to accelerate the digital transformation journey...
September 9, 2021 • 3 Minute Read
Updated October 2022
Vaishali Ghiya
Head of AWS Partner Business Development
Amazon Web Services
(Previously—Head of Networking and Security Sales
Amazon Web Services)
Are you looking for a sales leader who knows how to bridge business and technology discussions to accelerate the digital transformation journey? We know the person—Vaishali Ghiya!
Vaishali is the Head of Networking and Security Sales for Amazon Web Services (AWS) with extensive experience in sales executive leadership roles. She is responsible for enabling customers and partners to accelerate their digital transformation journey to AWS. She is passionate about growing business, bridging business and technology, and transforming her teams with love. She regularly leverages her sales and engineering experience to straddle both business and technical conversations with executives and technical decision makers.
Please meet this IT Wondrous Woman™, Vaishali Ghiya!
Our 10 Questions for this IT Wondrous Woman.
Fun Facts
1. What’s the one thing about you that your business colleagues don’t know about you?
I love to garden, learn about drought tolerant, low water plants and where I should plant them in my garden.
2. Before the pandemic, how many air miles/KMs did you flying annually?
Somewhere between 75,000 to 100,000 miles per year.
3. What is the most adventurous food you have eaten and what city/location did you eat it?
I love to experiment with different kind of salads. A restaurant in Nice, France served a delicious salad with dressings in injection.
Your Career
4. What are the top two experiences, achievements or failures that shaped your journey as a successful leader?
I was fortunate to be able to move from engineering, to product management, to executive sales leadership roles in my 23+ years of career in cloud, security and networking. I learned great valuable lessons along the way in each role and transition, and I leverage them to earn trust with customers, partners and my team.
I am passionate about transforming the team with empathy and love. I strongly believe as a leader I not only enable and accelerate my team’s professional life, but also make a big difference in their personal life. I strive to be their chief cheer leader and this has helped me to create allies, followership and the relationships that I cherish.
5. Did you have a mentor in the early part of your career and, if so, what is the biggest lesson you learned from your mentor or influencer?
“Good things happen to good people, focus on the customers, being a great leader and delivering results; Success and people will follow.”
Walking In Your Shoes
6. What is one piece of business or career advice you would give to your younger self?
Don’t be afraid of taking risks and turning them into new career opportunities.
7. As a leader, how do you remain a resource for people early in their careers?
I love to mentor, sponsor, and celebrate emerging talent. I am part of an Executive Women Forum, where I have an opportunity to mentor aspiring women leaders and make lasting connections with them. I find opportunities and platforms to coach, guide, mentor or sponsor on a one-on-one level. I also speak at industry events and internal company events to share my career journey, experiences and lessons learned to a broader audience.
Today’s Business Environment
8. What is the most interesting project you have worked on in the last few years?
The best part of my job at Amazon Web Services (AWS) is customer insights that I gain as they accelerate their journey to the cloud. As workloads migrate to the cloud, customers’ network traffic is going to stay in the cloud and site-to-site connectivity is going to shift to user-to-application connectivity. The underlying network and security infrastructure should transform to account for these transformative trends. I wrote a blog with one of my colleagues introducing network transformation on AWS that covers these trends, key use cases and prescriptive guidance for our customers and partners.
9. What skills are you currently developing or refining (in yourself) that will make you a more successful leader in the digital economy?
I am focused on helping our customers accelerate their digital transformation with right hybrid cloud solutions encompassing networking, security, containers and data analytics technologies, so I continue to learn what’s new and how do I stay ahead of the curve.
10. What is your greatest business challenge today?
Hiring the right talent fast enough in cloud networking, security, containers and data analytics space.
