Christopher Ash Email & Phone Number

Reston, Va, Us

Centennial, Colorado, Us

Developed and led a new product business within an existing mature services company with private equity funding. Formulated and executed plans to disrupt incumbent product market leaders from initial vision to product launch.o From New Entrant to Market Leader: Established our products as the preferred choice in the market with a 75% competitive win rate, and a trajectory towards a 14x Revenue-to-R&D ratio at 83% margin.o Product Organization Growth: Assembled a cohesive 30-person team with broad end-to-end responsibility of the product lifecycle from initial strategic planning & business case development, through product management, engineering & quality, to go-to-market launch & post-go-live support.o Organizational Stability & Leadership: Product department consistently held the highest retention metrics across the company. Cultivated with a clarity of purpose, clear roles and responsibilities, culture of innovation, and caring professional development.o Collaborative Excellence: Established a high level of collaboration and alignment across all departments and stakeholders including sales, marketing, and delivery.o Customer-Centric Culture: Fostered a culture of a market-driven direction, unwavering commitment to fulfilling promises, and ensuring customer success.o Fueled Company Growth: Company growth from 60 to 300 employees with most of the consulting and services billable revenue enabled by the new product lines.o Recurring Offerings Revenue: Additional initiatives underway to convert existing services revenue into recurring offerings revenue via cloud deployments, SaaS, and managed services.

Overland Park, Ks, Us

Norcross, Ga, Us

Executive leadership team member that recognized a 7x return on investment for private equity ownership in 5 years.Given the climate of utility industry disruption and emerging trends, identified solutions and segments for company growth while ensuring legacy solutions remained relevant to future strategic utility needs. Validated Comverge was in a position to compete in the chosen markets and ensured the market opportunity was worth pursuing. Solution offerings spanned the domains of distributed energy resources, demand response, utility capex optimization, and utility/consumer relevancy. Furthermore, responsible for:o Industry Analyst & Market Research Firm Management: Fostered relationships with market research and advisory firms ensuring the company and solutions were well represented in industry reports and leaderboards. Resulting in Comverge’s #1 ranking in the Navigant demand response vendor leaderboard.o Corporate-Wide Evangelization and Organization Readiness: Ensured corporate wide buy-in and alignment. Managed organization readiness to launch, market, compete, sell and deliver solutions.o Partner and Channel Management: Oversaw partner and channel prioritization to align with strategic planning goals. Execution of partnerships from initial identification through joint go-to-market approach and research & development integration.o Go-To-Market Execution: Oversaw initiatives to execute on go-to-market strategy, market positioning, marketing plans, pricing models, and associated launch activities.

Illustrative achievements: o Frequent instructor at conferences and author in professional publications, targeted to enhance market presence and grow business segments that align with corporate goalso M&A assessments. On behalf of an investment entity performed confidential assessment of independent software vendor resulting in a successful acquisition.o Vendor selection. Facilitated nine utilities through the competitive selection process for system integrator services and product vendors, from initial vendor landscape education, to final selection and contract negotiation. o Business development. Proven capabilities of generating and farming sales leads via industry relationships and supporting the sales process through contract award.o Strategic implementation roadmap planning, business case development and vendor acquisition for 20+ Investor Owned, Municipal and Cooperative Utilities across North America, Europe, & South America. Representative project included outlining $100m of information system, integration and infrastructure expenditures required to enable their Smart Metering/Smart Grid initiative, including defendable budgetary estimates that were used for regulatory filing and testimony without the utility having to undertake full competitive selection process.o Enterprise architect overseeing planning, acquisition, implementation, organization change, integration and acceptance of $300m smart meter, meter data management, customer engagement, and demand response program @ west coast North American utility. Delivering the planned utility enterprise-wide benefits.o Industry Influencer. Co-authored the 1st published scope for a new utility system, later adopting the now common name of a demand response management system (DRMS).o Delivery leadership. Responsible for the scope, services and integration of a meter data management solution at one Nordic utility, a province-wide solution in Canada, and two North American Utilities.

Houston, Texas, Us

Illustrative achievements: o Responsible for the implementation of Outage Management Systems at a 2 million customer utility in Brazil and a 600,000+ customer Mid-West Investor Owner Utility across 3 States. Integration with utility GIS, CIS, IVR, SCADA and Mobile Workforce Management, delivering utility-wide customer satisfaction, reliably and operations benefits.o Transformation of a utility call center to a customer self service center by empowering customers with online self-service tools to engage with their utility. Delivered at an East Coast Investor Owned Utility on the leading edge of the dotcom movements of the early 2000s.o Defined utility enterprise-wide smart meter benefits for Cellnet (now Landis & Gyr) AMI solution, at a time when AMI benefits were solely thought of in the realm of meters operations. Enterprise benefits identified across distribution engineering, outage management, mobile workforce management, revenue and billing, customer service, and demand response.

Illustrative achievements: o Systems Engineer for electric utility Geographic Information System (GIS) product pioneering the storage of geographic topology information in a relational database.