Vala Afshar is Chief Digital Evangelist for Salesforce, where he communicates with Salesforce customers and the digital business community. Viewing digital technologies through a business perspective, Afshar shares ideas on how these new ways of gathering, analyzing, and sharing data create opportunities for change and innovation.
Previously, Afshar was Chief Marketing Officer of Extreme Networks responsible for global marketing and customer service and support. Afshar began his career as a system quality engineer. Starting in 2011, he mastered social media as a means of communicating with and supporting customers, and today has more than 86 thousand Twitter followers.
Afshar helped to pioneer “social business” — the use of social media and social networking tools both to conduct business and to innovate the way business is conducted. He is co-author of The Pursuit of Social Business Excellence, and contributes technology, business, and leadership articles to Huffington Post, INC magazine, and other publications. He hosts the weekly video show, CXOtalk, featuring conversations with top business executives on digital business transformation and the changing roles of CIOs, CMOs, and CDOs.