Chris Kranz Email & Phone Number

United Kingdom

United Kingdom

London, Gb

As CRO, my focus is maximising the value of products and services our clients offer, understanding how to improve customer messaging and evolving go-to-marketing messaging to improve sales & growth. I also do regular Business 360 workshops with clients, a sort of business therapy session where we discover areas for improvement and development within their business. Internally at The Grafter, I also work closely with the rest of the leadership team to bring new products and services to market that will boost our clients and get them to their goals (potentially a strong exit too).

Polyvalent - having or using a lot of different forms or featuresPolyvalent is a company that provides both go-to-market consultancy services (sales, marketing, technology, etc.), and also builds SaaS products that assist in these go-to-market activities (social media advocacy, solution selling, etc.). We are a bootstrapped company that focuses on user impact & benefit instead of share-holders.

Duties include project management, damage limitation, education, travel logistics, mentoring, tantrum avoidance (~50% success rate), food preparation, supply chain management (trip and holiday organisation). Successfully made president's club each year (father's day and anniversary cards), although never received a pay rise. Managing a complex P&L budget. Work for an outstanding group of bosses, although multitasking between them is often challenging. Would not change this position for the world!

San Francisco, California, Us

The company had great funding, the cloud native market was growing, and cloud security was becoming a top priority. But Sysdig had a problem - there simply isn't people in the job market with the relevant domain knowledge to join the team and help grow our market. I was approached to solve this problem, as someone with solid technical knowledge of both the space and Sysdig products, and my ability to simplify the understanding and focus on customer value, I joined the new Enablement team to lead Technical Enablement. My primary focus was building a program that would allow the sales team to scale 300% in 12 months. We achieved that, and brought in-house a customised sales methodology, delivering both a cost saving, and reducing the ramp time of the sales team. Presidents Club for the following years were >90% people that I had either directly hired, or were part of the onboarding program I helped build.

San Francisco, California, Us

Sysdig was growing, but as a US based company, they were struggling to manage a world-wide team. I was promoted to help cover EMEA, including teams in Singapore and India. We grew the team from 3 to 13 before I moved on, and had staff across the region. We were fully remote and usually worked asynchronously. The team had a hugely supportive culture, and we extended our virtual team to include customer success and support. We had the highest retention world-wide, and some of the best performers world-wide too. Our team helped grow Sysdig significantly in the region and expand our presence across partners, customers, and the open source community.

San Francisco, California, Us

Sysdig was early stage, but starting to grow. They had a new sales team in EMEA, but needed some technical assistance with a complex product. I joined to help the EMEA team in the presales stages, but quickly worked out for success I needed to work with customer success and support teams too. We built a virtual team that although had different reporting lines, still worked closely together. Our ways of working was often quoted by the world-wide team as an ideal operating model. Sysdig continued to grow over the years following the great foundation I was honoured to be part of building.

London, Gb

Vocalink is a fundamental core part of the UK banking system, but the company had a challenge: How can we grow the business given we already have significant market share of the UK? The solution was to be able to package up their payments platform and deliver this around the world, expanding their market offering. I was brought in as part of a team tasked with building this platform. Packaging up an application to make it portable and repeatable meant we were building a containerised platform and needed everything to support this. This meant CI/CD, observability, security and of course Kubernetes. The portable payment platform was launched and delivered to the first non-UK customers.

Santa Clara, Ca, Us

Hedvig has brought to market a truly unique storage solution. As with most software-defined solutions it of course scale-out, but what makes it unique is the ability to scale-out as an active/active/active cluster across multiple physical (and logical) locations, including public clouds. All this from an enterprise tier-1 storage platform.My role at Hedvig was to help customers and potential customers get the most out of SDS with Hedvig, replacing DR or HA with DR & HA. The unique solution often means planning out how the existing infrastructure can be gradually evolved to be more cloud like, with applications being accessible and active from any site. Infrastructure and Application Architecture is key to making any modern IT transformation project a success.

Halifax, Gb

Assisting the team with the design, deployment and transition of a new infrastructure to support a new business initiative. Working with VMware, Tegile, Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus, Zerto and Veeam with lots of PowerShell. PowerShell automation work both for environment automation and auditing / health checks, integrating across various APIs and modules (including F5, RabbitMQ, Active Directory, VMware and a few others).

We work with businesses of all shapes and sizes, at all levels. Our main focus is helping people better understand what technology can do for their business and how they can adapt their own skills to stay relevant to both the business and the latest technology. We can help build an IT or cloud strategy, assistance with writing and running tenders (RFP, ITT, etc.), data centre and cloud migration, application refactoring and modernising IT infrastructures. Our passion is IT excellence and we work with our customers to ensure this is delivered in the most cost effective way. Our consultancy is available on both short term and long term engagements. Our aim is to spend the time making sure our customers end up being fully self sufficient.

London, London, Gb

Brought on to assist with several transformation projects within the business, including driving data centre efficiencies, strategic use of IaaS (both private and public), unified communications, PCI-DSS, Active Directory consolidation and other projects. Assisted in setting standards for consumption of AWS cloud services, as well as migrating specific services into Route 53, EC2 (for development and disaster recovery) and S3. Worked closely with the contact centre team to select, negotiate and migrate to a cloud telephony platform, including a fully managed IVR, ACD and secure credit card handling.Spent a lot of time working across the business, selecting and working with stake-holders in building project documentation and business cases to be presented to the board. Working closely with the project management team to refine business cases and project planning. Lots of involvement with the DevOps community in streamlining the transition from code to infrastructure, working alongside Go and Chef pipelines to enable a much quicker delivery framework. Initial investigations into containerisation of code within wrappers like Docker. Small amount of Node.JS and bash coding to automate AWS services.

London, England, Gb

Kelway are rapidly becoming one of the UKs leading system integrators / value-added resellers. In addition to the very successful fulfilment business, in 2011 they committed to growing in the services and solutions areas and I was employed to help develop and build this. Working across multiple technologies including a primary storage focus on HDS, EMC, HP, IBM, Dell and NetApp solutions, with VMware, Cisco, VCE, Citrix, Redhat and Microsoft virtualisation and Cloud solutions. I was responsible for working on some of the key accounts within Kelway and working closely with the projects team to assist these customers through various programmes of change. Many customer meetings were focused around white boarding the different solution options available with little preparation and ensuring that the customers' requirements were clearly recorded and met by any solution proposed. This in turn developed into designing the project and ultimately becoming the technical design authority during the implementation.As Practice Lead I directly manage around 10 Solutions Architects, ensuring they have the focus to work on customer projects and that their lives are as simple and worry free as possible! Not always a direct management role as the team are very self sufficient but mainly acting as a firewall to keep politics and problems away from them. I regularly arranged team events, set the strategy and gave individuals training and business objectives to complete. Assisting where appropriate with projects and workload to maintain the teams high quality and profitability to the business.

Chesterfield, Derbyshire, Gb

• Senior NetApp Consultant working to deploy all the largest projects on all levels of systems. Specialising in minimising downtime and impact of any project• Senior VMware Specialist working to deploy many environments in excess of 200 VMs• Assisted many customers design complete DR policy and how this can be automated with existing NetApp and VMware technologies• Consulting role working to win new projects with customers who are existing VMware or NetApp users but require more of a technical deep dive and troubleshoot complex architectures• Designed, deployed and managed a custom support infrastructure to support around 500 NetApp systems (B2net are now ASP certified in part due to this work)• Custom scripting using PHP and BASH to assist customers to fill management and automation gaps before projects and technologies filled this