Will Rau Email & Phone Number

Newcastle Upon Tyne, Gb

Following Sage's acquisition of Lockstep, I am continuing in my role as the owner of all data connectivity to the Sage Network. By joining with Sage, the Lockstep vision is hyper accelerated to become the accounting workflow engine for every SMB company in the world. By connecting a given ERP (via one of the Sage Network Platform Connectors I govern), accounting teams are able to interact in true workflow application, built by either Sage or any partner leveraging the Sage Network API, with any other company ERP in the world, independent of those individual ERPs' capabilities. The connector martials all CRUD and ERP specific business logic necessary to abstract data and operations to a common Platform, fundamentally changing the world of Accounting Solutions after 150+ years of stagnation.

Remote, Us

Doubling down on our new opportunities, I am heading Lockstep's focused effort to build a world-class Connector Program. This program creates and supports the ERP, CRM, e-Comm, and Payment systems integrations that are the foundation of the Lockstep Network.

Remote, Us

As General Manager, responsibilities expanded from an integrations focus to guiding all efforts for the development and delivery of Lockstep Receivables to new and existing customers.

Remote, Us

Returning to my start-up roots, I have joined Lockstep to expand the company's addressable market by growing their ecosystem of ERP & Payment Integrations, along with expansion into Fintech applications. Looking forward working with Lockstep to fundamentally reshape the AP/AR experience.

Durham, Nc, Us

Following the successful delivery and launch of Avalara's India GST solution and the end of my 2 year assignment to Pune India, Avalara asked that I shift to Product Management in Durham, NC to take ownership of two of Avalara's longest-running challenges: Consumer Use Tax and Avalara Identity. Consumer Use Tax (CUT) has from the company's inception remained one of the hardest indirect tax challenges to solve. Providing holistic solutions in this area for any size business is particularly challenging because of a combination of the complexities of CUT, the myriad difficulties capturing the right data on an array of transactions including invoices, purchase cards, employee expenses, capital purchases, etc, and the broad lack of understanding by companies of what their liabilities might be and how to address them. Traditionally an SMB doesn't take note of Consumer Use until a painful audit, for which CUT issues are the number one most common compliance failure. My new charter is to be the owner of Avalara's Consumer Use Tax strategy, and delivery solutions for all sizes and types of companies struggling in this space.Central to the new CUT strategy for Avalara is a newest SaaS service - Avalara Consumer Use. I ran Product Management and Engineering Direction for the Beta and V1 of this AWS based serverless (lambda/step function) solution. This solution has since fully launched with more than 100 customers by end of 2020.Owning a solution for Consumer Use Tax required a highly technical mindset, so have proven to be a challenge for traditional Product Managers. My combination of technical ability, business acumen, and broad experience in delivering SaaS solutions makes me uniquely qualified to bring to market world-class solutions in this area.Following ACU's successful launch, I also took a leadership role guiding another V1 offering by Avalara in the area of Transfer Pricing.

Durham, Nc, Us

Based on his success transforming the Connector Program, Will was asked to relocate to Pune, India starting in May 2016, to continue a focus on excellent connector development while assisting all the engineering teams based out of that office. Original goal was to replicate the connector program results across the Pune offce to build high performance, agile teams able to accomplish more and work better with their US and Europe counterparts. This goal was met in the first 10 months. His followup mandate was to guide and shape new efforts / team to expand Avalara's capabilities in India, with a focus on the efforts required to position Avalara for the Goods and Services Tax (GST) changes which came to India in July 2017. GST is the biggest change in Indian tax law since independence in 1947, and represents a huge opportunity for Avalara. During his two years there, William led the overall effort to create, deliver, launch, and sell Avalara's India GST Returns solution. This AWS lambda based solution delivers end to end India GST automation capabilities unmatched by other solutions offered. Ours was the first to successfully file a GST return and continues to set the pace for GST automation within India. Will, functioning essentially as the General Manager for this solution, had the unique pleasure of directing and contributing to every aspect of this service's delivery, from inception, system architecture, and creation, thru marketing and sales, thru system security design and validation, SaaS operations automated deployment and delivery, and support mechanisms. In the course of this effort William became a recognized expert on India GST which included speaking at multiple events across the country and authoring numerous articals on the topic with both national and international publications like CIO magazine.

Durham, Nc, Us

Brought into Avalara to rebuild the Connector Program, which is responsible for building Avalara’s competitive moat – the deep integrations into top 30+ key ERP and point of sales systems that make real time tax calculations simple to secure and make the Avalara services easy to deploy, onboard, and maintain. These included GP, AX, NAV(Navision), Sage 300/500, Netsuite, Quickbooks Desktop, Salesforce, Zuora, InforXA, Tally, and more, as well as our SDKs for .NET, Java, IBMi, PHP, and Apex. At the time Will joined the company, the program was in shambles. Leadership in place had alienated and traumatized the engineering staff (40+ resources), most of whom were based in Pune, India. No new functionality had shipped in 5 months, there was no clear picture of the supported versions under management, the program was unable to provide any sort of expected ship dates, and the relationship with product support was toxic. Will transformed both the program team structure and the way the entire program delivers value. By shifting to a Bus Stop delivery model, we were then able to predict deliverables many months out, with negotiated content and full stakeholder buy-in. By adding a Readiness Release process, he transformed a toxic UAT process with support into a regular cadence of education and enablement for all internal stakeholders. By restructuring the team into five separate, high-performance agile teams and promoting from within to build strong leads, he transformed a large, stalled program into five nimble, highly motivated teams who deliver real customer value the Agile/Scrum methods. In 2 years, the program has successfully added QBO, Workday, CS Cart, Open Cart, Concur, Stripe, and Wennsoft to our portfolio. Stripe alone added over $500k in ARR in the first four months. By the end of his tenure, the program was 75+ employees strong including 2 directors, 5 managers, and two architects.

Successfully transformed a struggling security product group into a high performance, agile team who now delivers the leading solution in the Behavioral Analytics SaaS market. I lead all the Development, QA, & Product Management resources. I built the Engineering team thru internal promotion and mentoring, as well as successful recruiting. I owned design of the service from its inception, I have personally built many aspects of the service, and as part of a close-knit Dev-Ops org was instrumental in designing the production environment and delivery systems.My responsibilities also include:* Salesforce, MS Dynamics, and SAP integrations: Personally built the Visual Force pages and Apex classes for SF. For SAP, I created the first prototype in the last week of the quarter, allowing us to close the single big deal in company history. * Created the SF ISV Vertical: By building usage tracking into our AppExchange offering, I created a new market. Usage tracking is an issue Salesforce has struggled to solve for almost three years. * Sales and Marketing coaching and support: Often sought for advice and to provide a technical voice to customers, and built most of our demo systems. * Director of Information Security: Including our SSAE SOC2 Audit.* Intellectual Property: Personally manage the corporate patent portfolio.* Facilities Management: Manage all facilities needs and have successfully moved the entire company twice.About Scout Analytics™Scout Analytics is the leading provider of cloud-based recurring revenue management solutions. The Scout Analytics platform transforms usage data into predictive analytics for customer renewal behavior and trial conversions. Our solutions are designed to reduce customer and revenue churn, increase renewal revenue yield, optimize rate plan performance, and maximize trial conversions. With over 120 customers in it's first two quarters, Scout Analytics increased customer revenues by 10-15%.

I transformed then BioPassword’s QA department into a high performing team that not only provided superior QA services, but also redesigned the software development life cycle and change management systems to higher quality software in less time. I was promoted to Engineering Director based on this success.Note that Scout Analytics has gone thru two name changes while I've been with the company.

Bellevue, Wa, Us

Today Concur is considered the first SaaS company, and Will was a key leader on the program that made that transformation possible. Will retooled the QA department and development processes, making it possible for the engineering team to complete a full re-platform of the expense management product from Microsoft ASP/COM to J2EE, as well as a full transition to delivering Software as a Service (SaaS). In addition to leading the quality efforts there, he also took over as the Program Manager for the final stages of development and stabilization when the existing PM had to step out for personal reasons. His leadership there resulted in the first incarnation of Concur Expense – the flagship service upon which all of Concur’s subsequent success is built. He continued to lead the QA team as they scaled from that initial release thru the first 100 customers and beyond, which included the tripling the size of the local QA team, as well as the addition of a highly productive, 15 person offshore testing team fully integrated with the local engineering team’s SCRUM process.

I led the technical charge to transform InfoImage from a premier, Lotus Notes software consulting firm into a Microsoft-centric, Corporate Portal platform company and market visionary leader. This company delivered some of the first Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems as they are known today.I was promoted to this position to replicate the success I had building a high performance development team. My department consists of three groups: Quality Assurance, Tools & Process, and Performance & Scalability.* I designed and implemented processes and tools, creating a highly productive, use-base driven, cohesive development organization. * Create a QA organization focused on results.* Solved many technical issues that development had been unable to solve. * Wrote and presented numerous technical white papers, both internally and at customer sites.* Educated the field and sales organizations. Many times I applied technical expertise to drive up ROI and solve real customer pains.* I personally designed, developed, and deployed iCentral - the portal for the entire company. This was subsequently productized and was sold as “Express Portal”. * Performance and Scalability expert for the company. Defined metrics and testing methodologies using Rational Performance Test. Client companies have asked InfoImage to consult on P&S testing after reviewing my results.

InfoImage, Inc. develops enterprise portal platform for e-business applications, which enable businesses to collaborate information through intranet and extranet systems to extend the reach and value of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems like SAP R/3, Peoplesoft, J.D. Edwards and Oracle Financials. I led the team the built the first of these portals as hiring manager for three development teams on the Freedom product thru several successful, on schedule releases, including the inception of the product. * I personally built the first prototypes of the Freedom Portal, which successfully proved out the technical feasibility and market value of this new platform.* Delivered the foundation components for the product: Metadata services, content & user administration, packaging & deployment tools, intrgration with external, disparate data. * Successfully transition the development team from Lotus Notes to MS technologies.* My couch/mentor approach resulted in constant improvement in developer skills and a happy, effective team. I often hear, “You are the best manager I’ve ever had.”* As a contributing leader, I designed and coded for all of InfoImages products (both Notes and MS based) as well as for many internal tools for dev process support (CM, Req. Mgt, Defect Tracking, etc), plus the company intranet.

Sr. Lotus Notes Developer and Architect contracted to design and deploy the Domino interface to Freeway, their centralized document versioning repository. Technologies included Domino Development, COM, C++, Visual Basic , and an understanding of Outlook and Exchange.

Designed, coded, and delivered Lotus Notes/Domino web integrations for their Smart Card Order Processing and Fulfillment System. Also designed and implemented the company's Electronic office with Notes as it’s hub, as well as trained the entire company on it's use.

Served as howitzer section chief, retention NCO, and BOC (Battery Operations Center) NCO for 1/180 FA Charlie Battery, Az. Army National Guard. Assisted US and Mexico border patrol on the Arizona-Mexico border. Completed both PLDC (Primary Leadership Development Course) and BNOC (Basic Non-Commissioned Officer Course). Leadership positions included Howitzer crew chief, unit retention NCO and the unit headquarter's NCO-IC. Honorably Discharged.

Built the QA department from the ground up, built all of TTI’s dev, quality, and requirements management systems, including config management, build systems, and change control. Established user acceptance testing and beta testing, and build all of TTI’s first white box test code in C and SQL. I then lead the team that tested and secured security certification for the first wide-spread application for Smart Cards for our client EPS (Electronic Payment Systems). This system continues to see use today, especially in the pharmaceutical industry.

Startup that developed the World’s first gaming modem + games for the Nintendo NESS, NES, and Saga consoles. Will built both the QA/QC and manufacturing departments for Baton from the ground up, which grew to a team of 5 in that first year. Will personally managed all third party designers, vendors, and manufacturers, which included an extensive RFP process to design the modem housings and connectors as well as the manufacturing process, to create and manufacture the world’s first cross-console device. Will negotiated 180-day terms on manufactured goods and built the capabilities to be the largest producer of a modem product in the world in 18 months. Additionally, he wrote software specs, reviewed code, created graphics, personally designed games, organized trade shows, and demonstrated product.

Us

Wrote GTX’s first QA Plan, and led the first project in the company's history to be released with no known defects. That project was version 1.0 of RasterCAD - a revolutionary plug in tool to AutoCAD that continues to be developed and sold to this day (up to version 15+). The first version of that tool was built only two people, myself and a single developer in only 8 weeks using SCRUM methodologies, test driven development, continuous integration, and AGILE principles years before these term was coined. During my tenure at GTX, I developed tools for Engineering and QA, implemented test & dev methodologies, and statistical TCQ methods. I supplied technical support, wrote new product specs, and demonstrated at trade shows. Promoted from part time, intern QA engineer to QA team lead in my first 5 months with the company, then to QA manager within the first year.

Bs, Industrial Engineering - Software Quality

Associate Of Science, Engineering