Freshworks appoints Dennis Woodside as new president for heading global operations

Nasdaq-listed Software-as-a-Service firm Freshworks has announced the appointment of Dennis Woodside as its new President responsible for leading Freshworks’ global business operations and strategy.

Woodside will also join the board of directors and will be reporting to Freshworks CEO and Founder Girish Mathrubootham in this newly created role, the company said in a prepared statement on August 31.

“I am excited to partner with Dennis and add his experience scaling global operations to our team. His skills will help evolve our business and allow me to focus on our company vision, culture, and product innovation – areas that bring immense value to our employees and customers,” said Mathrubootham, CEO and chairman of Freshworks.

With the new global operations head, Freshworks will focus on aligning all the business operations to its go-to-markets, Mathrubootham said in an interaction with Moneycontrol.
“The immediate focus will be on switching to conversational engagement support, continuing the good traction in growth seen in IT Service Management (ITSM), and work on our new customer relationship management (CRM) tech that we are working on,” he added.

Woodside’s role will specifically focus on executing the global strategies of Freshworks and making sure that the company’s GTM is aligned and the day-to-day operations, Mathrubootham said.

Woodside held various sales roles at Google over nine years, including Managing Director of Emerging Markets, Vice President of Sales in the UK, and President of the Americas, where he oversaw an $18 billion advertising sales business.
From May 2012 to April 2014, Woodside served as CEO for Motorola Mobility LLC, reporting directly to Larry Page after the company was acquired by Google. Woodside currently serves on the board of the American Red Cross and was previously on the board of ServiceNow from 2018 to 2022.

Freshworks has been making leadership talent acquisitions in the past few months. It recently appointed the chief Product Officer of Cloudflare Jennifer Taylor to the Board of Directors.  It also announced the appointment of Simon Ma as its new director and regional manager of sales for ASEAN markets in July.

Talking about growth in SaaS in the Indian market, Mathrubootham said that the company is witnessing increased growth in business and revenue in the Indian market.

“We are seeing more than average growth in India this year and the India market is actually growing faster than other markets primarily due to the overall SaaS growth and our due to our favourability and experience in the market,” he said.
However, Mathrubootham also said that on a macro level, every company, including Freshworks will see the impact of the recession that is going on.

In August while announcing the company’s second-quarter results Mathrubootham said that its small and medium business clients are feeling the macro pressures, and the company is seeing this translate to higher churn.
He said that the situation still remains the same and there is some impact in Europe and the large and enterprise customers are resilient and are showing steady growth. The firm is also staying cautious on hirings. “We don’t have to hire aggressively as the global market landscape is changing, however, we will be more cautious and selective,” he said.

Freshworks guided that its revenue would rise 31-33 percent in constant currency, and non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) loss would be $12.5-14.5 million. It reported a revenue of $121.4 million for the April-June quarter.
“Our guidance remains the same, however, due to the recession there will be some impact on all companies,” he said.

The company is also keen on inorganic expansions, especially in the areas that it operates, customer service, ITSM or CRM.
“We have a dedicated team and a plan looking for good opportunities but we are not in a hurry or we don’t have to acquire to grow our revenues...we have enough capital in the bank so we are open to acquisitions,” Mathrubootham told Moneycontrol.