Resume Page

SUMMARY

CORE COMPETENCIES

WORK EXPERIENCE

International Business Machines (IBM) Austin, TX
Product/Offering Manager, Analyst & Market Strategy: IBM Cloud
July 2014 - Present

Analyst Relations, IBM Cloud

• How does a venerable, hundred-plus year old technology company not only stay relevant, but be an innovation leader, in a rapidly changing technology landscape? Adaptability. Agility. Perceptiveness. Empathy. Determination. Working with my bright, enthusiastic colleagues in the IBM Cloud business, I have applied all of these skills to the transformation underway at the company, driving its Strategic Imperatives.
• Over the last four years, since moving into the Cloud team from the company's traditional ITSM business, I've been able to apply all of these skills to a variety of rolls, helping to lead the company's transition even as we listen to our clients, and help them with their own transformations.
• I'm helping to solidify the market presence for IBM Cloud, providing customers with an open, flexible innovation platform, no matter what stage of their cloud evolution they may currently be at.
• I propel analyst strategy across the cloud platform team, ensuring that analysts receive a consolidated and consistent picture of our cloud platform initiatives and strategy, and that their feedback makes it into the design and development organizations, to influence roadmap and investment.
• I work with development and design teams to ensure that empathy and market understanding are part of everything that we do.
• I particularly enjoy working with customers - legacy and new - applying lessons from the IBM Garage Method, to understand where they are on their journey, and where they want to go.
• Dedicated to helping direct sellers, inside sales representatives, and business partners articulate the capabilities and benefits of the IBM Cloud platform to their customers.
• Constantly pursuing a broad understanding of the cloud market and competitive landscape, as well as analyst sentiment, to help guide investment decisions, feature roadmap, and sales messaging.

Analyst Liaison, Cloud Portfolio Strategy

• Maintain a clear and up-to-date understanding of executive strategy, market dynamics and analyst sentiment
• Work closely with the Analyst Relations team to understand all the nuances of analyst relationships, so we aren’t attempting to swim against the current with our strategy for keeping them updated on our strategy.
• Engage with product teams well in advance of analyst briefings, to understand the details of their current work andget their help in understanding how it fits into the bigger picture.
• Enforce rules of engagement in which every analyst briefing from a product team needs to include the “Google Earth Approach.” They will begin by looking at a view of the big picture (which I create and maintain) and then drill down into the details of what they’ve built. Before leaving, they’ll drill back out to the planet portfolio view, to tie it all together.
• Engage with product teams outside the scope of scheduled briefings, to add a voice to discussions around how to prioritize features and schedules, based on my understanding of analyst dynamics. Product teams may be blissfully unaware – while toiling away on a really cool new feature – that prominent analysts have lined themselves up in a completely different direction.

• Helped to create the market presence for a brand new IBM Cloud business, establishing new business processes, license and contract standards, pricing and subscription models, support mechanisms, and courting a marketplace of third-party service suppliers. This role was a logical next step beyond the Software as a Service arena of my previous assignment. Much of my responsibility has entailed helping our new and existing IBM customers envision - and ultimately achieve - the myriad cost-savings, efficiency and speed of innovation benefits that will come from streamlined application life cycles.

  As our offering neared its one-year anniversary of entering the market, I helped to drive a shift in focus from a pure public PaaS offering to a hybrid offering that features single-tenant hosted and on-premises versions of the same PaaS platform, providing the on-ramp that enterprise customers need to finally accelerate their cloud transformations. In a sense, we spent the first year focused on designing the outside of the car, the interactive user systems and gauges, and the interior, and we're now focused more on strengthening the engine and suspension so that it will be able to go anywhere, under any conditions.

• Working with development and design teams to explore and understand the capabilities and usage scenarios from a landscape-changing platform that gains new power and features every month
• Created a new specialization within the team (successfully enough to get funding to hire two clones of myself at the beginning of 2016) focused on analyst messaging. When individual products teams within the cloud portfolio show off their latest accomplishments to analysts, I help them fit their details into a consistent, cohesive message that helps analysts better understand the big picture (and see that WE understand the big picture of the market).
• Working with early-adopter customers to assess their needs and desires both for application development features and user interaction
• Helping enterprise customers map their journey from legacy, on-premises application development and deployment practices through a gradual Cloud migration, yielding hybrid (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, on-prem, bare-metal) application delivery architectures that provide intoxicating speed of innovation with ultimate efficiency and rock-solid security
• Helping Bluemix trial customers, initially enamored of the platform's ease of use, envision real long-term benefits to their growing businesses by being able to react nimbly and quickly to market changes, user demand and competitor tactics
• Helping direct sellers, inside sales representatives, and business partners articulate the capabilities and benefits of the platform to their customers
• Spreading adoption of "modern" application life cycle principles such as DevOps and Continuous Delivery that have become much more practical via Bluemix
• Developing a broad and deep understanding of the competitive landscape that this new IBM offering has been launched into, to help guide investment decisions, feature roadmap, and sales messaging
• Help drive awareness of IBM Bluemix with the analyst community, participating in briefings, responding to assessments and presenting our vision to them.
• Tabbed to participate in two new IBM social media initiatives to help drive awareness of our rapidly innovating Cloud portfolio and help to establish our voice across multiple channels

International Business Machines (IBM) - Cloud & Smarter Infrastructure Austin, TX
Market Manager: Application Performance Management
August 2013 - August 2014

• Team Lead: IBM Application Performance Management Product Managers
• Product Manager: IBM SmartCloud Application Performance Management - Software as a Service
• Establishing new business processes, license and contract standards, pricing and subscription models, support mechanisms and new channel offerings to offer IBM Application Performance Management as a hosted service, deployed on IBM's SoftLayers cloud, and serving customers worldwide.
• Defining requirements and working with development on a realistic schedule to migrate APM capabilities from our legacy portfolio to the new SaaS delivery architecture, based on market analysis, customer requirements and development resources
• Attended IBM Design Camp, emerging from that week with a new team comprised of myself, an IBM Lead Designer, and a lead architect, and used that training to bring new IBM Design principles and rigor to this new SaaS offering, culminating in a centralized "SaaS Hub" for not only my new offering, but other systems and service management products to follow.
• Worked with Finance to craft an innovative new business case that allows us to not only predict revenue and gross profit margin from our new SaaS offering, but also to continually update those numbers and model proposed changes by incorporating countless inputs via formulas and variables that can be conveniently changed. We were able to use this capability to revise our business case almost instantly when asked to switch from one hosting provider to another, by simply plugging new cost-case numbers in. Recently presented to our CFO with an extensive stream erosion analysis, this business case is now the model for other offerings in our portfolio as they begin their moves to SaaS delivery.
• Developed and presented an executive business case articulating the viability and necessity of developing a SaaS program for our portfolio, successfully obtaining a dramatic increase in the development headcount allocated to the project.
• Developing new channels and new routes to market to tap a customer base not traditionally served by IBM/Tivoli monitoring products, focused on industry trends toward IT decentralization and increased decision-making power for line-of-business application teams.
• Continue to drive the success of IBM/Tivoli's application monitoring products in the largest enterprises down to the mid-market, by overseeing the roadmap, defining product vision, working with channel teams and defining marketing requirements and collateral.
• Own our portfolio's relationships with the analyst community, participating in briefings, responding to assessments and presenting our vision to them.
• Maintain detailed knowledge of these products, their performance in the market, and further this understanding by closely tracking the needs of both existing and potential market segments and the competition, effectively communicating this knowledge to product managers.
• Build partnerships among cross-corporate teams to deliver on-schedule product use cases, persona documents, requirements documents (line items, RCS, CLD, sparkler documents), DCP documents (concept, plan, availability, EOM, EOS), content for enablement materials, including presentations, white papers, demos, and sales guides.

• Product Manager: SmartCloud Application Performance Management, ITCAM for Microsoft Applications, SmartCloud Monitoring - Application Insight
• Developing a new application performance monitoring solution for cloud-based workloads, based on technology developed in the IBM Research labs. This elastically scalable, heterogeneous, multi-tenant, is based on distributed database technology and requires no centralized management infrastructure, offering a nimble, low-touch solution to service providers and end users who need to manage dynamic workloads running on private, public and hybrid clouds.
• Develop new channels and new routes to market to tap a customer base not traditionally served by IBM/Tivoli monitoring products.
• Continue to drive the success of IBM/Tivoli's monitoring products in the largest enterprises down to the mid-market, by overseeing all aspects of product delivery and the road-map, defining product vision, gathering product requirements, and working with product development to build the product, and with product marketing and sales to ensure the product's success in the market.
• Maintain detailed knowledge of these products, their performance in the market, and further this understanding by closely tracking the needs of both existing and potential market segments and the competition, effectively communicating this knowledge to all appropriate stakeholders in the organization.
• Continue progress in adapting traditional IBM/Tivoli management tools for Cloud paradigms by pushing new architectures, adopting new protocols, incorporating new features and designing around new use cases.
• Maintain close collaboration with the Architecture Team and senior development managers on product technical strategy. Interact extensively with customers, analysts, market managers, to drive product vision and plans.
• Build partnerships among cross-corporate teams to deliver on-schedule product use cases, persona documents, requirements documents (line items, RCS, CLD, sparkler documents), DCP documents (concept, plan, availability, EOM, EOS), content for enablement materials, including presentations, white papers, demos, and sales guides.

• Responsible for, creating, refining, prioritizing and championing product requirements to the development organization
• Conceived of new product bundles, leveraging existing technologies, to create easier-to-sell solutions to customer needs, rather than offering them "bags of tools"
• Developed innovative new pricing and licensing models to adapt our portfolio of enterprise management products to new IT paradigms, including SaaS and Cloud
• Influence portfolio product and financial strategy to ensure that my products and their customers are given appropriate priority in investment decisions
• Introduced new, game-changing functionality into our products and portfolio, overcoming "old guard" resistance at times, including holistic health dashboards, capacity analytics, ease-of-use launchpads, integrated network monitoring and virtual appliance delivery
• Face of IBM Tivoli monitoring products to customers
• Maintain customer relationships to build a strong user community and product references
• Creation of product collateral for marketing and sales enablement
• Planning and driving key customer facing events and sales clinics
• Technical presentations, analyst and executive briefings
• Smiling patiently while coping with the bureaucracy involved in delivering software products for one of the largest technology companies in the world, traversing the halls of finance, marketing, sales, support and development, gaining executive buy-in to build and ship.

• Specialized in the capabilities and architecture of infrastructure monitoring (including networks, servers and applications), event correlation and analysis, business service management and related offerings.
• Evaluated and certified the capabilities of various offerings - from a wide range of vendors
• Assisted architects in identifying and getting past functional hurdles in integrating customer-chosen vendor products with solutions delivered by IBM.
• Extensive customer travel and interaction, presenting solutions and participating in proof-of-concept and other architectural planning sessions
• Comfortable with developing and delivering information presentations in person, via webcast, over the telephone, etc.

• Serve as a test team lead - analyzing requirements, studying and approving system designs, writing test scenarios and test plans, managing change requests, tracking and reporting progress and evaluating entry and exit criteria.
• Interact directly with customers and business partners, participating in requirements gathering, feature development, problem resolution and Value-Add enablement programs.
• Help develop and deliver training, demonstration and proof-of-concept presentations for customers and business partners, using technologies such as Lotus Web Meetings, VMware, Windows Remote Desktop sharing, and PowerPoint.
• Experienced in traveling to customer sites for problem resolution, deployment assistance and proof-of-concept engagements.
• Evaluate custom solutions developed by third parties, assuring relevance, accuracy of claims and documentation, and verifying functionality.
• Craft white papers and other documentation designed to supplement the IBM Tivoli Monitoring documentation and our custom solutions.

• Performed scale testing on an enterprise infrastructure monitoring application,pursuing scale targets and compiling best-practices for meeting those targets in real-world deployments.
• Served as a technical liason to customers via the IBM Tivoli Monitoring Customer Advisory Council Beta Program, making numerous customer visits, participating in customer workshops and responding to questions in the beta program's user forum.
• Developed and delivered comprehensive training, for L3 support personnel, on the inner workings of the IBM Tivoli Monitoring product, focusing on debugging and problem resolution.
• Performed functional and system test on e-commerce application and infrastructure monitoring products.
• Performed scale, functional and system test on data warehousing and reporting applications.
• Served as a test team lead - analyzing requirements, studying and approving system designs, writing test scenarios and test plans, managing change requests, tracking and reporting progress and evaluating entry and exit criteria.
• Via the Customer Advocacy Program, interacted directly with customers, both remotely and on-site, to address implementation difficulties with our products, and gather feedback for future development.
• Because of my experience in test system management, I was heavily relied upon by other team members for UNIX installation and configuration of other hardware help during lab setup periods.

• Performed functional and system test on e-commerce application and infrastructure monitoring products.
• Served a six-month term as lab administrator, performing all aspects of system installation and management for test lab.

• Performed functional and system test on the graphics subsystem of IBM's AIX UNIX operating system.
• Performed hardware/OS integration testing of newly developed graphics accelerators for IBM RS/6000 workstations and servers.
• Served as installation team lead for 100-system lab, managing AIX NIM installation server, writing post-install scripts, and creating custom scripts to apply and subsequently back off various device driver and OS patches.
• Served as system administrator of team test server, upon which were stored staff home directories, test suites and test-tracking data.

• Transformed written and electronic customer data and inserted it into FileMaker Pro databases and content display areas of private BBS systems.
• Managed private BBS systems for clients, typically non-profit organizations and state agencies. Duties included maintenance of BBS systems, resolution of client connection issues and customer training.
• Made auditorium presentations to members of client associations, demonstrating the capabilities of their BBS systems. Constructed and maintained information/demonstration booth at clients' annual conferences.

EDUCATION