Senior Manager, Enterprise Resilience
PwC
Total years of experience :33 years, 10 Months
Working within the Risk Assurance division of the Middle East practice on projects mainly related to IT Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. My role is usually that of technical lead solution architect and I own the definition and delivery of current state assessments, architecture definitions and solution designs. I have enhanced the frameworks currently in use with significant additional input based on my experience with many other customers. I provide vendor-neutral guidance, advice and consultancy to align the identified business requirements with the appropriate solution.
Working within the Risk Assurance division of the Middle East practice on projects mainly related to IT Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. My role is usually that of technical lead solution architect and I own the definition and delivery of current state assessments, architecture definitions and solution designs. I have enhanced the frameworks currently in use with significant additional input based on my experience with many other customers. I provide vendor-neutral guidance, advice and consultancy to align the identified business requirements with the appropriate solution.
Responsible for mainly public sector sales of hardware, software and services related to digital forensics.
Engagement with integrators and end-users to understand requirements, identify appropriate technologies, design and build cost-effective multi-million dollar proposals and present to stakeholders to win mindshare.
Baseline assessment of and identification of improvements to sales processes
Demonstrated rapid acquisition of new domain knowledge to become quickly effective
• Experienced Intermediary between Business and IT, settled and committed to Dubai
• Wide range of experience in pre-sales and post-sales solution design
• Up-to-date industry knowledge on trends, strategies and customer adoption
• Comfortable presenting to C-level, one-on-one, or at conferences to hundreds
• Excellent proposal-writing skills and use of ROI tools
• TOGAF 9.0 and ITIL 3.0 Foundation Certified
Responsibilities:
• Working as a member of the small team of consultants (10-12) across EMEA who deliver strategic advisory and implementation services on critical, complex or emerging solutions.
• Enablement of specialized partners to deliver implementation services for storage management and high availability products
• Providing service governance to ensure that best practices are followed
• Providing design review and implementation assurance services
• Development and roll-out of advisory services related to disaster recovery, data classification, information lifecycle management and storage optimization
Accomplishments
• Regular speaker to large audiences at Symantec and partner events
• Regular engagement with C-Level executives to position Symantec business value
• Large variety of consulting engagements across Europe, Middle East and Africa (UK, France, Switzerland, Hungary, Turkey Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Nigeria, Kenya)
• Experienced facilitator for risk management workshops with customers
• Regular contributor to local IT press on topics such as disaster recovery, business continuity, datacentre optimization, cloud computing, virtualization and Green IT
• Contribution as Subject Matter Expert to virtual team producing Reference Architectures
• Took on additional responsibility as local Engagement Manager for development of new service proposals related to security attacks in Middle East during 2012
• Provided cover as on-site Service Delivery Manager at a large telecoms customer in Saudi Arabia for one month in 2012
• Volunteered to act as regular Incident Commander as part of Business Continuity management team
Veritas Software was acquired by Symantec in 2005. I joined Veritas to strengthen the team of pre-sales consultants specialising in the Application Performance Management (APM) toolset called i3 which was acquired when Veritas bought Precise Software in 2001. My application development background and my previous experience with understanding all levels of technology from desktop to storage and everything in between was instrumental in me being able to engage with all levels of customer to deliver the right solution for their requirements.
Responsibilities
• Secondment from UK team for 4 months as Technical Account Manager for Alinma Bank, followed by transfer from UK to Dubai team in April 2008
• Primary technical contact for key finance accounts in Saudi Arabia and Jordan
• Line management of pre-sales team based in Dubai, Saudi Arabia and Egypt
Accomplishments
• Project management of multiple successful POC exercises at Alinma Bank in Saudi Arabia resulting in $900K licence deal and several other large service deals
• Line management of presales team included a particularly challenging period when one of the team was given a Performance Improvement Plan and I needed to spend a lot of time on coaching and management. The plan was a success and the team member is now making significant contributions to the team’s performance again.
Key Achievements and Responsibilities:
• November 2006 - April 2007 Participation in the first EMEA Braveheart programme for high-potential individual contributors. I was the only member of the UK presales team of 60 people to be accepted onto this programme, which provided a range of personal and professional development modules to prepare delegates for their first management role. The end result was the creation of a personal victory plan which I used on a daily basis to focus where and how I spend my time.
• Participation in annual and quarterly account planning and review sessions
• Acting as role model for best practices including adoption of new sales process and championing the use of salesforce.com amongst my peers and colleagues
A variety of end-user and software vendor roles focused on implementing and optimising IT solutions to deliver business value
1983-1987 Exeter University BA (Hons) 2.ii Arabic and Islamic Studies.
1977-83 Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe 3 'A' Levels French, Latin, General Studies 8 'O' Levels English Language, English Literature, French, Latin, Greek, Physics, Chemistry, Maths
8 'O' Levels English Language, English Literature, Maths, Physics, Chemistry, French, Latin, Greek
