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Matthew Howard
SVP and CMO at Virtru
Matthew Howard is an experienced executive and entrepreneur who joined Virtru as Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer in January 2022.12 With over 25 years of experience in marketing and business strategy, Howard leads Virtru's go-to-market strategy, focusing on accelerating enterprise customer growth, brand building, product marketing, strategic partnerships, and expanding Virtru's developer ecosystem.12
Prior to joining Virtru, Howard served as SVP and CMO at Sonatype, where he led global marketing and demand generation for software supply chain management and DevOps automation.2 His career highlights include:
- Co-founding, developing, and successfully selling two software companies1
- Leading sales and marketing efforts at Groove Networks (acquired by Microsoft) and USinternetworking (acquired by AT&T)1
- Playing a key role in scaling Sonatype from less than $10 million to $100 million in ARR, leading to its acquisition by Vista Equity Partners in December 20193
Howard's educational background includes:
- A Bachelor's degree from The George Washington University
- An MBA from George Mason University
- An advanced degree in Innovation Management from the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business1
At Virtru, Howard joined the company following a $60 million growth funding announcement, positioning the company to define the market for Zero Trust data access and establish TDF (Trusted Data Format) as the open standard for sharing and protecting sensitive data.23
Howard is also actively involved in the DMV (DC, Maryland, Virginia) tech community, serving as the founder and core organizer of the DMV Rising conference.3
Highlights
Ride the Tide! #NATO isn’t the only “security” meeting happening in Washington DC this week. Virtru is hosting our mid-year enablement session, and driving continued innovation in data-centric security. Bill Smith, Dalton Menhall, Andrew Lynch, Trevor Foskett, Will Peppo, Brett McCrae, Megan Leader, Mike Morper, John Ackerly, Carrick Longley, Shannon Vaughn, Jason Green, Dana Morris

Sobering and incredibly thoughtful perspective from Forrest Brazeal on the real threat to #opensource #software. Three things:
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Eric Raymond would agree: the XZ attack was not attempted because it was open source — rather, the attack failed because it was open source, where enough eyeballs make bugs shallow.
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There’s so much money at stake. It seems inevitable that we’ll see more projects like OpenTofu and Valkey that “shadow” source available versions — making members of the ecosystem angrier than they are already are.
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Indeed, it’s a sad situation. It’s scary too if it leads to a more closed world with less scrutiny, and far fewer eyeballs.
Andy Hunn, David Rutchik, Ilkka Turunen, Mike Wilkes, Dana Morris, Zack Conord, Tyler Shields, Richard Stiennon, Derek E. Weeks, Mark Miller, Matt Asay, Mishi Choudhary, Esq. HashiCorp, Redis, OpenTofu, Valkey
