Chris Knowles Email & Phone Number

After working for decades at companies large & small, in individual contributor & leadership roles I decided it was time to take a big risk and see if I could make it on my own. I resigned from my position at Google and became self-employed, with a plan to decompress and dive into my own ventures.

Canada

Leading the charge in educating the Google Cloud technical field force.As Technical Enablement Lead, I develop and deliver technical training for the Google Cloud Consulting Organization, focused on developing and enabling the technical roles (Consultants & Strategic Cloud Engineers) with the skills they need to be successful in delivering engagements across AI/ML, Infrastructure Moderinization, Application Modernization and Data Analytics.Some of the technical enablement I had the most fun creating hands on labs & content for:- AIML on VertexAI- MLOps on VertexAI- Google Cloud VMware Engine- Mainframe Modernization on GCP- Data Analytics & Data Lakes on GCPI am responsible for the development and execution of large scale, multi-day technical events that involve thousands of employees participating in in-person and virtual events focused on deep technical enablement across every aspect of cloud computing and the customer journey. From ideation and demonstration to architecture design and ongoing operations. These events are anchored with highly technical hands on lab experiences that I am directly involved in the development and execution of.

Professional Services

The Principal Architect within Professional Services Engineering (PSE) drives a culture of innovation into how we develop and deliver Professional Services to our customer and acts as a mentor and technical leader to the PSE individual contributors. In PSE I am focused on how we can change the nature of work for our Professional Services delivery consultants and the Client Solutions Executives selling their services. I am seeking to do this through the development of systems that dynamically generate datacenter architectures and automate the documentation, implementation, validation and post-deployment IP harvesting across engagements in both greenfield and brownfield datacenters.- Development of Domain Specific Language (DSL) for the authoring of modular parameterized datacenter service architectures- Creation of virtual innovation teams to drive specific goals on a project by project basis- Develop professional service offerings aligned to the geographically specific field needs- Rapid prototyping of systems & application services to automate and optimize the execution of PS delivery

Global Services

Principal Architect and Director of the Innovation Office within Global Services at VMware. My team and I invented and delivered VMware Skyline from concept through POC/POV to customer facing beta, with Skyline being launched at VMworld in 2017.https://www.vmware.com/ca/support/services/skyline.html- Created, secured funding and ran all aspects of the GS Innovation Team, a high performance team of highly motivated innovators & collaborators. I fostered a culture of openness and sharing, believing in the philosophy that a rising tide raises all ships and that innovation does not happen in an ivory tower, but everywhere and anywhere. It was our mission to help people be successful innovating both within the team and across the company.- Designed innovation processes for the development of high value ideas from concept to production- Onboarded and lead CS interns within GS in the development of ML driven support automation and data markup systems.- Filed 5 patents. 1 patent-pending algorithm for multidimensional timeseries metric analysis, 4 recent filings still under non disclosure. Please see patents section of profile for more details.- Researched and created novel systems applying ML to all aspects of the customer support experience (live case & historical analysis) to drive the vision of predictive support for our customers. (Machine Vision, NLP, Classification, Event analysis)- Lead and delivered on a successful OCTO xLabs project providing environmental sustainability & carbon footprint analysis for datacenters by geographic location. Successful exit from xLabs with project receiving additional funding in 2018.- Created and lead the Livefire program, a deeply technical training program delivered to VMware field technologists. I also personally delivered Executive Livefire enablement to VMware OCTO staff, including CTOs and incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger.- Write code. (Primarily Java/Groovy & Python)

Global Technology Solutions Center Of Excellence

Lead Architect for Cloud Infrastructure Management in the Global Technology Solutions (GTS) CoE.In this role I was regulary tasked with developing systems and extensions to deliver on customer specific outcomes that were not facilitated by VMware's core product functionality. This was accomplished through the development of systems, code, and workflows that integrated our products with one another or with 3rd party technologies and stand-alone bespoke systems. Many customer facing R&D projects were implemented including Storage-as-a-Service and Auto Scaling and Cloud Bursting on the vCloud Director platform.In my role within GTS I act as the chief architect of our enablement program and am a member of the CTO Ambassadors organization, where we act as a bridge between the field, our customers and the Office of the CTO. I regularly engage with our global enterprise customers on-site in support of customer escalations and top deal support. I specialize in automation/orchestration and complex integrations between the various components of the vCloud Suite and 3rd party systems.The Global Center of Excellence within GTS has three primary objectives.Top Deal Support & Escalations. Providing technical and operational expertise to augment the field sales and specialist teams for large scale and complex deployments requiring extensive integration or customization efforts.Specialized solutions enablement. Design, develop and deliver training to the field specialists focused on end to end solutions based on the vCloud Suite stack and 3rd party integrations. The training is expert to expert interactve training that is based on our lessons learned from engaging with our customers as a part of customer escalations and top deal support.

The role of the Solutions Architect (SA) is to act as trusted technical advisor to our prospects and clients to ensure that they are fully leveraging the capabilities of the uptime software products to achieve their business goals. In this role I bridged the gap between customers goals and product capabilities by researching and developing new product modules and concepts.The SA plays a key role in both the pre and post sale major account management process. In the pre-sale role, the SA acts as the owner of the technical solution selling components of our sales process. They are responsible for discovering the prospect’s true business needs & product requirements, documenting solutions, prioritizing deliverables, facilitating a successful product evaluation and roll-out and winning the prospect’s technical acceptance of proposed solutions. In the post-sale role the SA acts as a the ongoing technical trusted advisor for marquis clients by providing a key escalation point for major account technical challenges, advises on and disseminates best practices to our clients and researches new product solutions.Develop custom modules for our core product up.time in order to provide advanced customer specific functionality not provided out of the box by our application.

The systems architects at Scalar Decisions designed infrastructure (hardware & software) solutions for our customers to meet their specific business needs. Acting as trusted technology advisors and implementation engineers for technologies from Sun, Oracle, HP, Cisco, VMware, f5 Networks, Netapp and many others.

The Systems Architect at STG designed solutions to meet STG's customer needs based on software and hardware technology offerings from Sun Microsystems. The SA acts as a trusted advisor to STGs customers, and as the key technical contact during the sales process.

- Systems Administrator and implementation architect for mission critical unix infrastructure (Solaris, AIX)- Capacity Planning- ERP infrastructure management- Design, deploy and manage all unix based infrastructure initiatives related to backup and recovery, authentication, administration, SAN management and monitoring.- Development of in-house performance/capacity management and automation systems (Java, PHP, KSH)

Provided datacenter management consulting services to enterprises throughout the world, specializing in IT service architecture as well as operations management assessment, planning and methodology development. Primary focus on FI, Energy and Telco verticals.Acted as a trusted advisor to Sun Microsystems strategic enterprise accounts throughout Latin America.Co-developed and executed on in house methodologies for the optimization of IT service delivery management through the assessment, methodology development, execution planning and implementation of changes within our clients organizations. These changes were related to their management processes, technology strategies, and staffing structures.

Open Systems team architect and integration developer for the launch of HA-Web, the precursor to the Easyweb online banking platform.Assess new technologies and develop deployment architectures for services deployed on open systems platforms. (Primarily Solaris & AIX)Evaluate and POC integration strategies between the Open Systems environments and host based applications. (OS390, XCOM, SNA)Develop JCL for batch data sharing between mainframe and open systems environments