Melissa Andrews, a seasoned technology leader with over 20 years of experience, leads the Department of Defense solutions engineering teams at Splunk Inc., a CISCO company. She is a career solutions engineer who entered the field through a training program at Oracle Corporation. She spent 18 years at Oracle as an SE supporting Army accounts, before leaving the world of relational data and moving to Splunk in 2015, where she has come to love machine data. She is a skilled technical presenter and facilitator, adept at working with customers to discover their pain points and helping them use technology to address them, as well as keeping them informed and trained about new advances.

Melissa moved into management at Splunk in 2020, and has quickly moved up the ranks, achieving the role of director in 2023. She partners with her sales leaders to develop enterprise strategies for their military customer base and helps her solutions engineers become valued partners in their accounts. She works to provide her teams with the tools they need for successful selling and has a reputation as a “problem solver.” She still takes every opportunity she can to meet with customers and get hands-on with Splunk products.

Prior to Cisco's acquisition of Splunk, Melissa served as co-lead of Splunk's Black employee resource group – BEAMS, where she collaborated with leadership and other ERG leaders to strengthen diversity and inclusion initiatives. She has since stepped into the role of co-lead for the AMER chapter of Cisco's Connected Black Professionals (CBP) inclusive community. In this new position, she's focused on facilitating a seamless integration of BEAMS members into CBP while advancing inclusion and equity efforts across Cisco's ecosystem.

Melissa holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Information Systems from Columbia Union College (now Washington Adventist University) in Takoma Park, MD. She lives in Maryland, with her husband and two sons. She hails from Guyana in the Caribbean and enjoys beach vacations.