Ahmad M Sawas

**** ******* ** *********, ** *****

650-***-**** ac9d28@r.postjobfree.com

Career Summary:

** ***** ** ** ****** Operation supporting P1 applications

7+ years in Infrastructure/Servers, Virtualization, Cloud Computing and leveraging OpenStack, FreeBSD, KEMP and Postgress and building/migrating to a new company private cloud.

11+ years hands on experience in software/database development in Unix/Linux, including 5+ years in Business Intelligent/Data Warehousing and Web Logs analysis.

Lead the team that implemented large and complex programs for major enterprise applications supporting 100+ K employees including executives globally.

Excellent track record to bridge the gap between technical teams & executives and the ability translate business initiatives into technical requirements

Excellent track record in building IT strategies to support company vision and relaying business value to executive for different technology related initiatives.

4+ years startups experience with 2 companies where one went public.

Built 4 different teams from the ground up (4 new initiatives in 3 different companies)

Highly professional, team player, strategic thinker, visionary leader and self-motivated with experience working in diverse, cross functional groups and different management levels

Experience in Agile development methodologies with emphasis on Scrum.

EMPLOYMENT

11/2015 – 12/2018 VP, IT – Exponential Interactive

Lead IT and Operation global team of 35 people with 5 direct reports.

Created the Information Technology strategies and implemented it on data centers, virtualization, global service desk, network security, change / incident management and global operations.

Partnered effectively with business leaders to establish technology strategies with focus on improving the operational efficiency, enhance capabilities, and reduce operational costs, including Oracle DB, OS, VMware, to build the next generation private and public cloud using Open Source/Opensource.

Optimized the infrastructure, improved services availabilities and the virtualization environment and implemented content Delivery Network (CDN) for critical production environments.

Responsible for the day-to-day operations and maintenance for all information technology services (IT policies, help desk, desktop services, voice services, messaging, collaboration, Finance, HR and Salesforce.)

Defined operational performance metrics that align with Iron Bow business objectives and provided routine performance reporting against those objectives. As a result, we reduced our global service calls by 30% year over year and reduced incidents that are caused by change to under 2% and reduced overall budget by 10% to 12% year over year.

Responsible for the team that managed the backend securities and patching processes and ensured that all systems and OS are fully secured.

Managed distributed global IT team, budget, negotiated vendors’ contracts and oversaw enterprise contracts and licenses.

Built and lead the development of the company disaster recovery, site recovery, and business continuity.

Built in house Network Operation Center (NOC) and utilized some of the tools such as PagerDuty, DotCom-Monitor and open-source Icinga for global 24x7 monitoring.

04/09 – 05/15 Sr. Manager, IT - Cisco Systems

As part of Emerging Technologies IT team, I built and managed global operations & support team of 45 people with 8 direct reports, from the ground, up to support Unified Communications HD systems globally.

Built and managed engineering support team to scale in supporting over 200 backend systems HD video infrastructures globally, including virtual environments (on Cisco UC systems)

Supported end-user’s services for TelePresence, Tandberg, Jabber and WebEx end points for both desktop and mobile systems for Cisco community at the global level.

Setup up a helpdesk to scale and support over 10,000 end points globally.

Built a release management office (change control, issue/risk management) and governed monthly/quarterly releases.

Lead the virtualization of some backend systems such as the migration of the Call Manager from MCS7845 to UCS300 on vSphere.

Introduced/implemented DevOps framework and some of its tool chain (Chef) to help scale supporting UC backend systems/endpoints – continuous integrations/delivery.

On point for gathering and improving service delivery operation both internally and externally which include supporting critical Unix Backend Systems and database (CTS-Manager, TMS, etc).

Inspected service health by defining consistent process and metrics to identify growth/ improvement opportunities on monthly /quarterly basis.

Established single repository to manage service portfolio, track program status and communicate to all management level.

Coached and mentored staff members and ensured all have clear and well-defined initiatives.

Introduced and guided the team to implement DevOps framework and some of its tool chain (Chef) to help scale supporting UC backend systems/endpoints – continuous integrations/delivery.

Conducted over 100 direct customer engagements, Executive Briefing Center presentations, in support pre-sale/post-sale for Cisco collaborations tool.

12/04 – 04/09 Manager, Enterprise Data Warehouse - Cisco Systems

Responsible for delivering SSoT (Single Source of Truth) data and reports to help Cisco management and stakeholders make strategic decisions.

Managed day-to-day operations and handled escalations within SLA.

Restructured the organization to accommodate data growth and the number of clients extracting data.

Standardized the process to stream line the day-to-day operations to accommodate continued growth, such as support, production changes, and case management resolution.

Managed the development and implementation of new standards and policies to operationalize EDW.

Participated and consulted in the initial assessment in implementing Teradata in Cisco and worked with cross functional team to implement phase 1.

Worked with infrastructure teams such as Database Administrator (DBA), Informatica/BO and System Administrator to plan and facilitate applying different Oracle patches, fix database issues and upgrade production database, ETL/ LAP tools and administer activities.

Performed capacity planning to ensure data availability and production stability.

Worked with cross organizations to ensure proper storage space is available for different releases.

10/00 – 11/04 Development Manager, Walmart.com

Joined the Walmart.com in it early stage (first 90 days) and focused on Oracle backend systems development.

Key player in contributing to the growth and scalability of the backend systems such as DB design, DB APIs development, search engines, reports generation, etc. to fulfill time to market requirements.

Co-architect of the OMS (Order Management System) and catalog schemas

Built an end-to-end organization for DW (development, QA, production and sustaining) and provided reports to Sr. management to help make strategic decisions.

As Data Warehouse operation manager, ensured the production environment is stable and reliable.

Handled escalations, defined processes and direction for infrastructures and operations.

Managed capacity planning for Data Warehouse System.

Developed tools strategy for ETL (Extract Transform and Load) and OLAP tools.

Conducted a successful deployment of Business Object for Canned reports and self-services model (power users).

Built DW repository for Web Server Log.

04/99 – 10/00 Manager, Database Development - Ventro Corporation

Joined Ventro, B2B eCommerce, as a Sr. Technical Lead Engineer during its early phase (first 20 people)

Managed and owned various aspects of the backend systems such as building new Oracle database systems on Sun Unix environment, new Oracle database design, migrating the entire existing Connect backend database systems (out of the box software) to the new Oracle database system.

Owned all core database development (Oracle) including all backend Oracle’s APIs

Lead the implementation of the database design/schema to be used by middle tier and front-end application.

Designed and built data replication using ProC and PL/SQL to propagate/publish data between different schemas.

Developed the PIMS’ data load scripts. These were developed using PL/SQL, ProC and Shell scripts. They included loading/updating large objects such as CLOB or BLOB (images).

EDUCATION

PMI-Agile Certified Professional training @ The Judge Group, Inc

BS (Computer Science), San Francisco State University, Dec. 1995.

AS (Computer Science/Engineering), Canada College, Dec. 1988.

RECOGNITION and AWARDS

* 2011 Manager of the Year award, Cisco Systems - IT

* Excellence in Operations (EiO) award May 2010, Cisco Systems.

* Support Top-Performance Award: Oracle Support Club winner 1997.

Contact this candidate