Bob Downs is the Managing Partner of KEMA Consulting, a Global Utility Strategy and Consulting company. Over his 30 plus year career in industry and consulting he has led the development and implementation of a wide range of business and technical systems including utility operational, financial, network, RTO, AMI and Smart Grid systems.

Bob Downs is Vice President of Global Strategy and Solutions within IBM. Over his 30 plus year career in industry and consulting he has led the development and implementation of a wide range of business and technical systems including utility operational, financial, network, RTO, AMI and Smart Grid systems.Mr. Downs held various management positions over a span of twenty years at IBM in the areas of commercial and industrial energy management, telecommunications network planning, and financial systems. He held positions of Director of IT Strategy and Budget, Director of Network Planning and was the project manager for PG&E’s implementation of SAP.For the past seventeen years Mr. Downs has been a utility strategy Partner for IBM focused on electric utility restructuring and utility industry business and technology strategy. He has led numerous large complex systems implementations. He has led several large systems integration projects for clients in the domains of real time T&D, financial and customer systems.

Led IBM's Global Customer Care practice for the Energy & Utilities Industry including 3000 industry sales executives and revenue contributions over $700M per year. Initiated and created IBM's World Wide Solutions and Sales Playbook for Customer Transformation. Offerings included customer strategy, business transformational outsourcing, application management, and implementation services. Key Strategic Alliances included SAP, Oracle, SPL WorldGroup and Itron.