Gerardo Dada

Gerardo A. Dada is an experienced technologist with over 25 years of experience in cloud, monitoring, network and application technologies. Gerardo is recognized as a thought leader in digital transformation, observability, and IT operations who has been at the center of the Web, Mobile, Social, and Cloud revolutions.  

Gerardo’s career spans leadership roles at some of the most influential technology companies shaping the modern digital landscape. He has been in leadership positions at SolarWinds, Microsoft, Rackspace, Datacore, and Bazaarvoice. Before joining Catchpoint, Gerardo was the CMO for Keeper Security.  

Throughout his career, Gerardo has been instrumental in building brand presence, driving go-to-market transformation, and leading organizations through periods of rapid technological change. He is known for his strategic mindset, deep technical knowledge, and ability to translate complex technology into business value for enterprise customers.

At Catchpoint, Gerardo is focused on empowering IT operations leaders and observability teams to deliver exceptional user experiences by providing unparalleled visibility into every critical system and digital touchpoint. He has played a key role in advancing Catchpoint’s technology leadership, including the launch of innovations like Connected Devices for real-world internet performance monitoring.

Gerardo is a frequent speaker, podcast guest, and contributor on topics related to observability, monitoring, and the future of digital business – he has been a featured speaker at JavaOne, Web 2.0, Internet Latin America, and many other conferences around the World and has been a guest lecturer at multiple universities. He is passionate about bridging the gap between technology vendors and enterprise buyers, advocating for a deeper understanding of customer needs and the real drivers of digital success. He was a regular columnist on database performance at DBTA where he championed the concept of Performance Certainty.

Some of the observability concepts Gerardo champions include:

• “Slow Is the New Down”: Redefining Digital Reliability and the need for Performance Certainty
• The opportunity for Observability teams to evolve to become an Operational Intelligence Team that has a seat in the Boardroom
• The need to implement a Digital Operations Center (DOC) as digital interactions are the lifeblood of every organization
• From Metrics to Meaning: Observability as a Holistic Practice that puts user experience as the ultimate objective and XLOs as the key metric
• The need for Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) to optimize the Internet Stack and the role of IPM complementing APM and NPM

Career History

Back in the early 90s, he was building Novell Netware networks, programming in Pascal, building applications in dBase III, and implementing software applications for businesses of all sizes.

In the early 2000s, Gerardo was the product manager for the first ever mobile development tools for Java2ME, PalmOS, and Symbian smartphones. Then he went on to launch one of the first web application servers at Pervasive Software. Later he was the global director of developer marketing at Microsoft where he launched Visual Studio Express and SQL Server Express products. He was also a top-rated presenter in the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center where he advised the most forward-looking CIOs and CTOs in the World on the future of mobile devices. Later in 2008 he launched the Rackspace Cloud and became a thought leader on hybrid deployments. At SolarWinds he was responsible for the database performance monitoring portfolio and the cloud monitoring portfolio, which included Pingdom web monitoring (RUM, Synthetics, API), Librato (time series data), and PaperTrail (log management), later expanded with tracing (AppOptics) building one of the industry first observability platforms.

Gerardo is fluent in Spanish and has working proficiency in French, reflecting his commitment to global leadership and cross-cultural collaboration.