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When Kate Bueker first left the world of investment banking for a corporate finance role, she was ready to savor the fabled congruity that a business finance career often offers.

\u201cI felt that what would be more interesting and motivating to me would be more consistent,\u201d recalls Bueker, who shortly after joining Akamai Technologies in 2007 became the first business finance executive to become \u201cembedded\u201d with the technology company\u2019s network team.

\u201cAt the time, Akamai\u2019s cost of goods sold\u2014which was mostly their network costs\u2014was growing faster than revenue, so the CFO at the time asked me if I could like figure out what was going on, or \u2018what was driving this,\u2019\u201d explains Bueker, who reports that she and her team quickly zeroed-in on the company\u2019s spiraling co-location costs, the fees being paid to operate the physical facilities that housed the company\u2019s network servers.

\u201cWe worked together on an operational change that would basically rebuild the existing co-location facilities and free up capacity from within the space that we were already paying for\u2014and it ended up that we did not add another dollar of co-location fees for the 2 years following this change,\u201d comments Bueker, whose nine different future business partnering activities at Akamai ended up involving both the product engineering and go-to-market sides of the business.

\u201cWhat makes these different parts of the organization successful is a bit different\u2014and the personalities and perspectives are a bit different\u2014so the holistic view was something that became increasingly valuable to me,\u201d remarks Bueker, who today assumes a similar vantage point when reflecting back on the personalities and perspectives that once populated her investment banking days.

\u201cAs with many roles, over time mine transitioned to one that determined more by relationship management and sales,\u201d observes Bueker, who notes that she came to realize that while she excelled at financial analysis and the negotiation aspects of being an investment banker, she was not always \u201ca comfortable salesperson.\u201d

Says Bueker: \u201cI think that the irony of the whole thing is that as you get more senior in your career, your success is more about partnering across the business and influencing people outside of your core area, which\u2014when you step back and think about it\u2014is really sales after all.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney