R&D Executive (SaaS)

Shadi Ashkar

Address: ** ******* ******, ****** *****, CA 92694

Phone: 949-***-****

Email: ************@*******.***

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/shadiashkar

Blog: https://medium.com/@ShadiAshkar

Senior R&D Executive

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

Dedicated R&D Executive with over 20 years of proven and consistent success executing on diverse large-scale products and cloud services. Notable reputation for creating and communicating technical and business vision to multi-disciplinary teams, developing full architecture, and leading organizations to successful execution. Keen ability to analyze complex situations and design practical business solutions with a global impact. Committed to managing complex projects flawlessly and consistently delivering desired results, while staying abreast of business strategy, corporate culture, tight deadlines and budget considerations. Successfully delivered complex PaaS and SaaS offerings to millions of customers worldwide.

SKILLS & EXPERTISE

- Entrepreneurial Leadership

- Technical Vision, Strategy & Execution

- Multi-Discipline Engineering Leadership

- Cloud Services Architecture

- Big Data Analytics

- Large-Scale Highly Available Systems

- Team Development

- Process Improvement

- Vendor Relations

- Contract Negotiation

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Sage Software, Irvine, CA:

Senior Director of R&D, reporting to the CTO, 2014 – Present

Created the vision for, and spear-headed, the Shared Services organization enabling the transformation of the R&D organization in Sage North America from delivering on-premise software to delivering a hybrid offering of Cloud Services integrated with on-premise software. This included big technical bets, new architecture, engineering process improvements and most importantly business process improvements to align with the Agile methodologies.

Led the Shared Services organization in architecting and developing common services and technologies to benefit all the R&D organizations across Sage Global. This included, among other things, Identity and Access Management, real-time provisioning, onboarding and entitlement, usage-based billing and API management. Supported and integrated solutions with remote engineering teams offering local and global services in the UK, France, Spain, Ireland, South Africa and Australia. Architected key services like the Authorization services, the Harmonized API service and the Onboarding services that allowed seamless integration between on-premise ERPs and the Sage Data Cloud.

Negotiated vendor contracts, entered into contracts on behalf of Sage for staffing, acquiring 3rd party software licenses and group training. Responsible for organizational budget and for business and usage KPIs/Analytics for all Cloud Offerings in North America.

Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA

Principal Development Manager, 1996 –2014

Staffed and lead cross-disciplinary engineering teams of various sizes to development success of multiple packaged software projects and cloud services, including but not limited to, Windows Server, Essential Business Server, Forefront Identity Manager, Forefront BHOLD suite, Windows Azure (PaaS), Windows Azure Active Directory and its Identity and Access Management services (SaaS) as part of Windows Azure Management Service.

Lead the acquisition of the BHOLD team and technology and led that organization from an on-premise software team to a key player in the Cloud Services space, in a matter of months, serving millions of AAD users and providing Business Intelligence value to the mid-size businesses and enterprises. Personally architected the high-level services for all our offerings.

In the early period at Microsoft, I lead engineering teams and delivered on projects like Outlook, Outlook Web Access, Word, Word International, Shared Office Components, etc.

Key Accomplishments:

Inventor of several patents in the System Health Monitoring, Server and Cloud Services spaces:

Coordination Engine for Cloud Selection

Scriptable Unified Object Model Across Cloud and On-Premise Services

Dynamic Carve and Merge of Windows Azure Clouds

Plug-In Model for Health Monitoring Systems

Staffed and lead the engineering teams for AAD cloud service, delivering data analytics, reporting and alerting on identity and access usage for millions of customers of Windows Azure Active Directory.

Established the Agile engineering processes to align the newly formed teams with developing and supporting large-scale cloud services.

Architected the AAD Identity and Access Management services reporting on machine learning analysis and rule-based analytics of real-time service logs and diagnostics data of Microsoft’s AAD cloud services.

Negotiated and signed vendor contracts ranging up to $1.75 Million each.

Lead the staffing efforts for multiple organizations across all functions.

Architected a complete end-to-end update system for Microsoft’s Cloud Platform, Windows Azure, to streamline the process of updating tens of thousands of servers in a dozen data centers globally with minimal human intervention and without service interruption.

Created the engineering infrastructure, including coding guidelines, security review process, and check-in guidelines for Azure Appliance and two other sister organizations within Windows Azure, to improve team productivity and code quality.

Architected and implemented major features in Microsoft Office Word, Outlook, and Outlook Web Access including the development of the first WorldWideExe for Word in 1996 to allow one binary to cover all international languages, including BIDI, and the security logic for securely handling attachments in Outlook in 2000-2002.

Self-Employed, Redmond, WA:

Technical Consultant, Microsoft Corporation, 2003 – 2005

Entrepreneur and technical consultant to Microsoft. Recruited and led a small team of contract developers and testers to design, build, and release complex incubation projects for the Office and CSS organizations.

Key Accomplishments:

Built a new Tasks (i.e. Outlook Tasks) project for MS Office based on the “Getting Things Done” approach and the project management Agile Methodology, while also using a brand new visualization technique that allowed information workers to manage thousands of tasks with ease.

Created a semi-automated, highly scalable, system for the CSS org that can collect diagnostic information from customers’ servers, run tools to fix problems and upload resulting non-PII data to Microsoft’s servers.

Sproqit Technologies, Kirkland, WA:

Senior R&D Manager, 2002 – 2003

Solved challenging technical issues in the space of cloud computing, which was still forming. Led the server-side team in architecting the security and communication areas between the mobile devices and their paired desktops/servers, and solving the associated technical and security challenges.

Key Accomplishments:

Delivered the end-to-end solution allowing mobile devices to offload their compute needs to a server across the Internet.

Co-architected the server-side applications along with the online data transfer, offline data caching on the mobile device, and security protocols.

Additional experience details, prior to 1996, available upon request.

EDUCATION

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Minor in Math – NOTRE DAME UNIVERSITY - Graduated Summa Cum Laude

Bachelor of Engineering in Computer and Communication Engineering – AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF BEIRUT

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT / MEMBERSHIPS

-Lifetime member of American MENSA (http://www.us.mensa.org/)

-Three-year Pathwise Leadership program graduate (http://www.pathwisemanagement.com/)

-Nominated and selected for the HiPo Program, Microsoft’s leadership development program for top performers (top 2%)

-Recipient of the Management Excellence Leadership Team Award in 2010

-Recipient of the Management Excellence Award in 2009

LANGUAGES

-Arabic: Native speaker

-English: Fluent

-French: Basic communication

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