Valerie (Val) Henderson is chief executive of Caylent, the Irvine, California, AWS services firm. She took the role on March 10, 2026, after nearly five years as its chief revenue officer and then president (Caylent).
From revenue chief to president
Henderson joined Caylent in June 2021 as chief revenue officer and became president in January 2023. In that time the company grew revenue more than five-fold, acquired the AWS partner Trek10, launched its Caylent Accelerate agent system, and won ten AWS Partner of the Year awards (Caylent). She has nearly two decades of experience scaling sales organizations and partnerships and holds a degree from Vanderbilt University.
Forward-deployed engineers
As chief executive she has pushed Caylent toward forward-deployed engineering. She told CRN that a third of the company would likely fit the model within a year, and described the role as engineering skill, AI fluency, and a high customer IQ combined (CRN).
Rebuilding Caylent around AI
In an October 2026 interview with Channel Insider, Henderson said Caylent had put Anthropic’s Claude into its own work, from first customer conversations through delivery and project reviews, and had reorganized teams to cut down on silos. “The pace of change has never been this fast,” she said of the pressure on enterprise customers. She expects AI to change the shape of services firms: “It’s not the pyramid anymore in services. It just isn’t.” Caylent, she said, has more open positions than ever, and it trains its own forward-deployed engineers with programs backed by AWS and Anthropic (Channel Insider).
She describes her approach to change inside client companies as starting with the people most opposed to it. “I always tell our customers, give me your biggest skeptic,” she told the same interviewer. “Let us sit with the person who is the most against making this change.”