We’re pleased to announce that Rima Alameddine, a former top sales executive with NVIDIA, has joined IonQ as Chief Revenue Officer. Rima is expanding IonQ’s commercial business by helping enterprise customers identify the critical workloads quantum computers can uniquely accelerate and sharing those learnings across industries.
We talked with Rima recently about her new role at IonQ and why she was excited to join the company. Here are a few highlights.
Rima spent six and a half years at Nvidia, where she built the company’s enterprise sales team from the ground up and served as VP of enterprise sales for the East and Central U.S. She then expanded Nvidia’s vertical industry focus and led enterprise sales in the Americas for HealthCare, Life Sciences and Manufacturing. Prior to Nvidia, she held senior sales positions at Cisco Systems.
Rima brings a deep understanding of how to work with organizations to help them unlock the power of new technologies and transform industries. She notes the parallels between her past and current roles. When Rima joined Nvidia, enterprises were just beginning to realize the potential of GPUs and AI, and by the time she left she had helped them develop clear strategies to capitalize on those technologies. Now, quantum is the exciting platform for the future, and Rima is ideally positioned to help customers unlock its potential.
“I’ve dedicated my career to helping customers realize the incredible power of technology and arming them with capabilities to solve tough challenges. Along with my talented team, I’m looking forward to partnering with world-class organizations to push the boundaries of what is possible,” she tells us.
Partnerships are key, Rima notes, and part of her goal is to nurture the ecosystem of companies that will help businesses bring quantum to life, from consulting and benchmarking services to security and management tools. She also plans to identify repeatable use cases and approaches that can be employed across different industries so that customers learn from each other.
Rima was drawn to IonQ by the strength of its founding team, its world-class engineers and its industry-leading technology. She believes that now is the perfect time for someone with her background and experience to take quantum enterprise adoption to the next level.
Rima is also passionate about equality and diversity. She founded and led the Cisco East Women Action Network and co-founded the Cisco Empowered Women’s Network, both devoted to advancing opportunities for women in IT. She was also an executive sponsor in the Cisco Momentum Program which helped all employees to hone their leadership roles to advance their careers. She speaks regularly on topics ranging from AI to leadership and Diversity & Inclusion.
Rima is one of several important executive hires that IonQ has made recently, including Wendy Thomas, President and CEO of Secureworks, to IonQ’s Board of Directors.