Leading a small advanced technical team in the secure access and advanced threat industry. Chartered to recruit, enable, and retain top technical talent across enterprise architectures and infrastructures, including, identity, advanced threat, Zero Trust Networking Architecture (ZTNA), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), Secure Web Gateways (SWGs) and other leading-edge security technologies.

Leads a technical team of three solution engineers who assist enterprise customers along their digital transformation journey. Responsible for recruiting, training and retaining top technical pre-sales resources to enable sales and achieve quarterly revenue targets.In my player role, I am responsible for providing pre-sales technical support for Akamai’s enterprise solution team in the identity (IAM), remote access, internet performance and security space. Defines customer requirements short (tactical), medium and long term (strategic) requirements by designing solutions to address technical and business specifications. This space includes, but not limited to digital identities, identity protection and access management for federated systems and application access. Works with customers to understand trusts relationships between organizations, companies and assist customers in identifying potential security risk to company’s critical resources and assets as part of Zero Trust architecture.Application security and access includes both legacy on premise application access as well as cloud based software as a Service (SaaS) applications in an ever changing and dynamic application ecosystem. This includes technologies such as security assertion markup language (SAML), OpenID Connect (OIDC) and other federated technologies. Assist customers in understanding this digital transformation and its potential impacts to organizational IT architecture and security postures from a myriad of threat vectors such as domain name system (DNS), phishing, malware, ransomware, DNS exfiltration and command and control (CnC) bad actors.Conducts various demonstrations of solutions as well as trials and proof of concepts (POCs). Assist with knowledge transfer of Akamai solutions and services to a partner and channel community.

Provide pre-sales technical support for Akamai’s enterprise solution team in the identity, remote access and security space. Defines customer requirements and design solutions to not only meet immediate technical and business requirements, but also strategic and login term requirements. This space includes, but not limited digital identities, identity protection and access management for federated systems and application access. Works with customers to understand trusts relationships between organizations, companies and assist customers in identifying potential security risk to company’s critical resources and assets as part of Zero Trust architecture.Application security and access includes both legacy on premise application access as well as cloud based software as a Service (SaaS) applications in an ever changing and dynamic application ecosystem. This includes technologies such as security assertion markup language (SAML), OpenID Connect (OIDC) and other federated technologies. Assist customers in understanding this digital transformation and its potential impacts to organizational IT architecture and security postures from a myriad of threat vectors such as domain name system (DNS), phishing, malware, ransomware and command and control (CnC) bad actors. Conducts various demonstrations of solutions as well as trials and proof of concepts (POCs). Assist with knowledge transfer of Akamai solution and services to a partner and channel community.

Provided pre-sales support activities with prospects, customers (both direct and indirect) and partners to identify identity and access requirements and design and articulate identity solutions to meet a dynamic and aggressive identity ecosystem. Conducted various demonstrations of Okta’s technology as well as worked with customers setting up their trials and working through proof of concepts (POCs) in various verticals. Single sign on (SS) technologies included security assertion markup language (SAML), secure password management and injection and OAuth. Worked with clients to understand their user identity management in various sources of truth such as active directory (AD), lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) and other directory stores. Solutions also expanded into more sophisticated user and application provisioning and de-provisioning as well as mobile device management (MDM) solutions. Worked and collaborated with product and professional services for more complex architectures.

Provide pre-post sales solution support for central, east and southeast portion of the country delivering value proposition for disruptive software defined application delivery (SDAD). Defined customer requirements and delivered technical value proposition and solutions for various eCommerce and web performance focused companies. Created and deployed JSON configuration and benchmark testing results for synthetic and production web traffic. Familiar with web performance tools such as Webpage Test and Catchpoint to create various types of testing. Performed analysis of data, created and delivered performance data to customers resulting in attaining and over achieving revenue quota targets. Understand and deployment of ground breaking technology using machine learning in image analysis, processing and deployment. Familiarity with cloud based web application firewall (WAF) requirements and deployments. Assisted in the content delivery insertion of fortune 500 web application platform from legacy home grown web application to Hybris.

Provides leadership for the technical services organization for the west coast area. This area of responsibility includes Texas, Colorado, California, Seattle and the Asia Pacific Rim. Provides technical leadership for complex business and technical requirements.Management emphasis on recruiting, developing and retaining high-performance, solution-selling engineers to meet a constant evolving high tech culture.

Provided leadership for sales engineering organization covering 5 states (Texas, Denver, Miami, Atlanta and Washington DC) while providing local sales engineering support for Houston, Dallas and Denver. Responsible for the hiring, training and career development of the technical services team in the region that supports local Market Managers and VP of Sales for both East and West Coast. Implemented and make process improvements on tactical executable programs as a single accountable owner with collaboration of Market Managers and other departments to support Internap’s strategy and business goals. Provided leadership in hiring and training of new hire AE, sales engineer, channel agent and value added reseller training. Hand selected to be a part of the “Internap Tiger Team” which is a CEO driven team of subject matter experts to provide technical leadership in delivering Internap’s value proposition for large enterprise customers and complex solutions. Brain trust and represented Internap during Houston Hurricane Club providing insight and best practices for data center services and disaster recovery options. President’s Club recipient 2010.

Provide leadership for sales engineering organization covering 24 states west of the Mississippi including the Asia Pacific Rim. Develop and execute strategies for the technical services organization for the region as well as source, hire and train technical consultants in various disciplines such as Colocation, IP, Content Deliver Network (CDN), Managed Hosting and Public/Private Cloud Services. Provide leadership alignment with other cross functional groups at Internap such as Sales Order Coordination, Service Delivery, Business Units (Colo, IP, Managed Hosting & Advanced Products (private and public cloud)) to advocate and implement process and procedures in the Technical Services organization. Technical thought leader in the advanced services area such as VM Ware, VCE (WM Ware, Cisco and EMC), various technologies such as Network Attached Storage (NAS), Storage Area Networking (SAN) and products as vCloud Director, OpenStack and IP Routing to ensure match between customer requirements and Internap product and services. Lead strategic projects landing major accounts such as Halliburton, Southwest Airlines, and ExxonMobil. Instrumental in the successful launch of Internap’s $30 million dollar state of the art data center which houses many of Internap’s advanced technical offerings such as colo and managed hosting.Develop SE business and by plan for new strategy for the SE organization. Work with SVP of SEs and collaboration between Internap’s business units, service delivery and operations to increase knowledge transfer between organizations. Revamped and reduced SE required documentation to process orders. This increased SE production by 20% by eliminating unnecessary documentation.Was key technical play in the successful wins of Digital Globe, Softlayer, Texas Instruments, Southwest Airlines, Dotomi and others which represented key deals for Internap from a strategic perspective.

Provided pre-sales technical support to Internap account professionals in local, state and regional markets. Provided consultative pre-sales, implementation and post-sales support for Internap’s core products and solutions, i.e. High Performance IP, Data Center Services, Managed Hosting and Content Delivery Network (CDN) services. Consistently enabled the successfulness of account professionals by exceeding revenue targets for the branch, market and region (2009 – 138% of plan). Built strong customer relationships, ensuring client requests were in-line with company values. Appointed leadership projects and positions to positively impact account professionals, technical services organization both locally and companywide. Provided leadership/mentoring for new team members added to the technical services organization. Conducted knowledge transfer to new and tenure account professionals as well as value added reseller and channel account managers. Demonstrated leadership abilities in high pressure “real world” situation such as Hurricane Ike. Hurricane Ike brought down power in Houston for several weeks and many companies whole businesses hung in the balance. Received many accolades from customers on quick actions to get customers into the datacenter and online.