Gigya, which provides social login tools and other social networking and gamification features to customers like Pepsi and Verizon, has hired Paul Farmer as its first chief financial officer.
Gigya says Farmer has 30 years of experience and that during his career he managed four initial public offerings. Not that every company he works for goes public — for example, he joined security company Silver Tail Systems last year, a few months before it was acquired by EMC. And before that he was CFO at Narus, which was acquired by Boeing.
Still, whenever a company hires a CFO with that kind of experience, tech reporters are contractually obligated to ask if they’re planning for an IPO. CEO Patrick Salyer told me via email, “While we can’t discuss our specific financial plans, Paul is going to really help us scale and his experience guiding later-stage startups towards IPOs is incredibly valuable for us.”
Back in February, Gigya told me that it was bringing in tens of millions of dollars in annual sales, and that its tools reached 1.5 billion users.
The company is also announcing that it’s reorganizing its products into something that it calls the Connected Consumer Management Suite. It will continue to offer its existing services, but Gigya says the new platform makes room for future products. It sounds like the move also has a lot to do with data.
“Through restructuring our platform, we’re giving marketers better, direct access to the data we collect so they can port it into platforms like Marketo, ExactTarget or any of the other vendors in our partner program,” Salyer said.