Samer Hamwi (Ph.D.)

Working as Senior IT & Business Consultant at Verizon Business (www.verizonbusiness.com), Professional Services in EMEA, in the practice data center, virtualization & cloud computing.

22+ years in the IT industry, including management and consulting, national & international (EMEA, USA, Middle East), PhD in IT for engineers, VMware Certified Professional (VCP), Certified PRINCE2 Practitioner, Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSK). I also do have sales accreditations e.g. VSP, VTSP.

My current responsibilities include - among others - two main roles:

- Business Development & pre-sales, e.g. qualifying and scoping business opportunities & customer requests in EMEA, leading customer engagements, working on tender and offer bids, defining & describing (new) services / methodologies / collaterals / technology road maps as per marketing & business requirements, reviewing and responding to customer’s Request for Proposal (RFP), developing Statements of Work (SoW), Governance matrix, engagement / project plan & WBS.

- Leading project delivery with globally distributed teams, engaging 3rd-party resources providers (TPV), acting as global projects manager (based on project size), project delivery manager, technical lead and Senior Technical architect (STA) on global projects with MNC (Multiple National Companies) and global accounts, defining required resources and skills and spanning distributed/ global delivery teams (EMEA / USA), and leading the developing and implementing of IT solutions and proposals.

In addition to the above main responsibilities, I do coaching junior consultants, acting as point of contact for professional services practices & engagements between Middle East and Europe, evaluating 3rd-party products/services providers & vendors to help projects/services delivery.

Working with Credit Suisse, Zurich/ Switzerland on project to implement workflows for credit Management based on IBM QM Workflow .

Providing IT consulting and management to develop software products and IT solutions, and manage development and integration projects, and to finding suitable solutions architecture in e-Commerce/ e-Business environments, especially when legacy software is in place.

working with diverse companies, such BOV (www.bov.de), IT service provider, and (www.tsi-events.de), a German-based international company for travel, tours and events management.

Major responsibilities and achievements:

* Establishing business relations towards customers, business partner and out-sourcing teams/companies in diverse industry branches and countries (EMEA).

* Analyzing business and functional requirements to manage and integrate people (e.g. customers, suppliers, employees), information and applications into the company’s Business processes

* Providing technology governance and technical leadership.

* Providing consulting for IT solution architecture based on modern software engineering methods and technology such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), web portals, XML.

* Analyzing and enhance business processes and workflows, and evaluating (make-or-buy) Software products to reduce cost and processing time and increase efficiency of the business process management (sales, order processing, customers and projects management, etc.).

Managing customer engagements and pre-sales, proactive business development, work statements/ bids, managing IT projects and delivery of IT solutions/ products.

My key Responsibilities include working with customers (and sales team/key accounts) to gather requirements, conducting requirements analysis, working with team of software engineers to find suitable solution architecture, supervising implementation and deployment and ensure acquiring the needed technology and know-how skills to delivery good projects and IT solution.

In addition to my main task of managing and monitoring the end-to-end development life-cycle of our Java Web-based portal, product delivery, technical customer support and the multiple IT projects, I worked on creating, organizing and improving the R&D infrastructure and processes, setting up the necessary management areas (e.g. requirements, development, test/QA, build, deployment, production environment, trouble-shooting and technical help-desk, etc), implementing the best practice of IT - development processes (e.g. customized RUP/XP), UML methology

I built and managed a multi-lingual/multi-culture IT team including 16 people in different roles such like analysts, system designer, developers, , documen writer, trouble-shooter.

As member of the EMEA Technical Leadership Core Team, I managed and coordinated projects, Technology and policy with cross EMEA and USA development locations and managers of the mother company Sabre Travel Network and business partner, providing sort of technology governance for our strategic leisure platform for EMEA, conducting gaps analysis for customer needs and market requirements.

Worked on building a "Common Component Group" to test and evaluate make-or-buy several software components to be integrated with Quark system. I worked e.g. on workflow management systems to select a 3rd-party workflow automation system to be integrated with the Quark's client/server products. My work included market research, requirements gathering, creating evaluation matrix, reports and conclusion. I evaluated the system architecture and the technology applied, the workflow engine (functionality, platforms, performance, etc.), the database (SQL, Oracle), the Web server (mostly MS IIS), the HTML forms generator, the administration and monitoring tools, the workflow visual definition tool, the user in-box. I educated and consulted Quark's development teams about workflow methodology and integration strategy. I worked on prototype of integrating to test the API provided and the technology used by the evaluated workflow systems (API in form of C-functions, COM/DCOM or CORBA objects).

In charge of IT teaching, training and coaching including the use of computer-based information and communication for planning, constructing and administrating, Object-Oriented Methodology and several programming languages such as C/C++, VB, and FORTRAN, on Windows and UNIX.

In addition to managing several government-funded projects, my responsibility included conducting market research on object-oriented software and computer-based models that could be suitable for a 3D structural building design to support CAD and information-based systems for structural engineering.

I also worked on my Ph.D. thesis using the results of projects and researchs.

On 16 Feb. 2000, I have defended successfully my Ph.D. thesis at the university of Kaiserslautern, Germany, getting my academic degree as Doctor Engineer (Dr.)