By Christopher Ruvo
The Ohio-headquartered Top 40 distributor has promoted Brian Carothers to chief information officer and named Mike Dobozy chief technology officer.
“We are very pleased to welcome Mike, who is a proven technical visionary and leader with a wealth of experience and innovative technical expertise,” said Vera Muzzillo, CEO of Proforma and a member of Counselor’s Power 50 list of promo’s most influential people.
Muzzillo continued: “We are also thrilled to recognize Brian Carothers, who is the best of the best for his accomplishments. Together, their business acumen and hands-on management styles will be critical to Proforma’s industry-leading technology initiatives as we continue our expansion and innovation in automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence.”
Dobozy was most recently principal architect at Red Hat, a software company and IBM subsidiary that provides open-source software products to enterprises.
Proforma described Dobozy as a “world-class thought leader” on automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence. He’s worked as a team lead on projects for Fortune 25 clients and has nearly 25 years of professional technology experience. Dobozy was also previously a product architect at ARMS Software, which provides tech-driven solutions on recruiting, compliance, data integration and more to collegiate athletic departments.
“I am very impressed with the software, team and processes that Proforma has developed,” Dobozy said. “I look forward to adding my expertise and experience to the development of seamless automation, efficient workflow and intelligent decision-making in the ProVision platform.” ProVision is Proforma’s proprietary business-management platform.
Carothers’ technology career also includes time at Red Hat and ARMS. He joined Proforma in 2015 and has played a lead role in advancing the distributor’s technology evolution, executives said.
PromoStandards, a community of suppliers, distributors and service providers in the promo market that work to standardize the quick flow of information to reduce transactional friction, has honored Carothers as its Distributor Person of the Year. He’s excited about teaming up with Dobozy.
“I am thrilled to help welcome Mike into the Proforma family,” said Carothers. “His deep expertise in artificial intelligence and platform automation at scale make him the perfect addition to accelerate our industry-leading technology.”
Proforma has been busy making leadership moves lately. This month, the company announced that Evan Gall had been promoted to vice president of sales.
Word on Gall’s appointment came a couple weeks after Proforma announced that it had hired Charity Gibson as chief marketing officer. Gibson has extensive experience in promo and is known throughout the industry for her influential presence on social media and her volunteerism.
Based on reported 2022 North American promotional product revenue of US$620 million, Proforma ranked fifth on Counselor’s most recent list of the largest distributors in the industry.
