Business Development Quality Assurance

Riccardo Cast Palmetto Bay, FL ***** +1-786-***-****

ad20zd@r.postjobfree.com

www.linkedin.com/in/riccardo-cast-0b611213

Director of Technology

25+ years of success driving worldwide technological companies for leading IT and telecommunications services. Multilingual professional with proven track record of international business, successfully capturing internal and external customers and market requirements. Enthusiastic to be involved with the latest technologies trend with acute business acumen and expertise creating and executing vision for building it and telco platforms, solutions, networks, development, services, and processes, from strategic point of view to satisfy customers and company goals and objectives. Capable of building and managing high-performing teams to boost competitive advantage and increase bottom-line gains. Engaging businessperson able to forge solid relationships with key internal and external stakeholders and foster collaborative partnerships across multiple operations, areas, and companies. Reporting directly to the CTO able to sustain a CXO meeting to make strategic decisions about the relationship with our customers, partners, and internal areas like product and marketing, finance, sales, legal, and regulatory. Strong working knowledge on both, computer technology for IT and Telco, and management procedures, able to understand the technological part and the executive part at the same time., with extraordinary ability to concentrate in the strategy and team management.

Skills, and Areas of Expertise

• Strategic & Tactical Planning • Quality Assurance • Customer Relationship Management

• Sales Cycle Management • Project Management • Data Center Operations

• Process Improvement • Account Management • Stakeholder Engagement

• Business Development • Presales Operations • Team Building & Leadership

• Working with upper-level IT

staff to develop and

implement department goals

• Staying abreast of emerging

technologies that can improve

IT department performance

and increase company profits

• Communicating with other

executives regarding costs,

value, and risk-potential of new

IT projects

• Managing IT personnel • Creating and implementing IT policies, protocols, and

standards

• Working with upper

management and senior IT staff

to develop the IT department

budget

• Ensuring that IT department

strategies and processes

provide appropriate support to

company-wide goals

• Overseeing contract

negotiations with IT vendors,

contractors, and service

providers

• Excellent Communication,

Interpersonal, and Presentation

skills

• Impeccable IT knowledge and

technical skills

• Excellent analytical and

problem-solving skills

• Skilled at strategic planning and

goal setting

• Superior leadership skills • Relationship building and team development skills

• Thorough understanding of data

management and administration

Professional Experience

Head of Global Business: based in Beijing, China / Madrid, Spain / Miami, USA (2011 – 2023) I hired my own 20 people team locally in Beijing from scratch, interviewing all of them to understand their knowledge, capabilities, commitment, experience, understanding, and skills, to start developing the strategy and implementation of Presales and Post-sales areas, Sales procedures including tools, providers relationships, and customer engagements. Responsible to create the strategy with our local strategic commercial partner to prepare our technological platform able to support our customer requirements, and to prepare our worldwide commercial force with the capabilities to sell our services. Develop customer’s IT strategy to implement their Apps/Platforms/Datacenters worldwide, including technological and financial aspects.

Revitalized APAC sales, identifying and securing 5 largest regional clients and modifying commercial approach to appeal to Asian culture, jumping from last place to win multimillion-dollar contracts.

Generated +€70M in global sales, aligning client and company needs by modifying ways company interacted with clients, improving customer focus regarding products and services; doubling regional revenue in 2013 and 2014; earned "Passion Award" for achievement in challenging environment.

In charge for developing with a team of developers several cross solutions under the following platforms/technologies/applications:

o Salesforce/Einstein

o Python/JSON

o AWS – Red Shift/S3/Quicksight

o MS Azure/Excel/Power BI/SQL

o Tableau

o Splunk

Spokesperson in several internal, and customers meetings, able to talk about our products and services, from technical to non-technical point of view, covering any single aspect providing competitive differentiation.

The team used Agile and ITIL best practices to develop every single projects.

Responsible to introduce new smart watches (prototypes) into our mobile network to define if the devices had technical issue about connectivity, and/or security breaches, satisfying our standards. Director of Technology located in Beijing for 4 years responsible for Presales, Post Sales, and Help Desk, offering IT and Telco services for the biggest multinational companies in the world, with HQ and branches mainly located in APAC, Europe, USA, and LATAM.

Defining and implementing internal process and procedure to start using Salesforce as the major tool for commercial, sales, legal, P&L reports, presales, post-sales, footprint, and anything else related to our business. Testing our roadmap platform before been delivered to our customers and supporting the customers to engage the new technology and use it in the best possible way. Head of Presales: Madrid, Spain (2006 – 2010)

Directed all aspects of presales, provisioning, post sales, data centers, and IT in LATAM region, formulating technical solutions unique to customer and country. Evaluated technical and economic feasibility of products and services, including satellite links, Internet, VPN/IP MPLS, cloud, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), Cybersecurity, and unified communications. Directed cross-functional team in LATAM region. Managed multinational projects, cultivating strategic partnerships, implementing critical Projects and critical path methodologies to control projects.

Developed business strategies with local partners and providers.

Engage and develop technical and economical offers for customers, answering RFP, RFQ, and RFI.

Developing SW to support company business and customer requirements.

Platform integration and consolidation to provide unique worldwide tools: reports, offers status, clients, footprint, including legal, fiscal, financial, and regulatory aspects.

Designing Data Centers, including physical and virtual platforms, Apps, sensors, connectivity and security

& cybersec (MPLS, Internet, Point-to-Point, dark fiber, CDN, Akamai, SASE, SD-WAN Meraki & viptela, fortinet, SASE, zScaler, Blue Coat ProxySG, Panda, McAfee, and Norton between others). o Data, Network, and Endpoint Protection

o Data Loss, and Data Breach Prevention

o Network Intrusion Detection

o Data Leakage Prevention

IT Manager: Madrid, Spain (2000 – 2005)

Responsible for the company’s data center including the communications and security, servers/desktops business applications, Virtual Servers, Helpdesk, backup platform, Telepresence, authentications, printing, mobile services, agendas, mailing, and anything else related to IT services, procedure, and platform to support more than 500K users worldwide.

Dedicated to support CEO’s IT services worldwide, mainly LATAM and Europe region.

Led email messaging migration from Notes to Exchange for more than 500K global user accounts, including designing, implementation, and technical specifications to migrate the inbox and mobile device

(Blackberry) in collaboration with HP Argentina (Microsoft Global Gold Partner). Earned “Team leader and Transformation passioned” award.

Held responsibility for benchmarking the company communication services and technology solutions.

Dealing with IT manufacturers/companies for global purchasing deals, including HW, OS, Antivirus, and Apps to cover 250K desktop/servers/datacenters worldwide. Director of Technology in charge of the Start Up in Rome and Zurich for UMTS mobile services deployed in Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany.

Responsible to migrate and consolidate every single office in Madrid, Spain, to a unique centralized place in Madrid known as Distrito C or Distrito Telefonica. Here I had to deal with creating the Data Center from scratch, security and cybersec (zScaler), configuring FWs (Firewall One), Switches, Routers, Servers (VMWare, MS Hyper-V, Clusters…), network analysis (wireshark), workstations, printers, applications, operating systems, backup (EMC2), and anything else related to our business. Education

Blended Pro Certificate: CTO Program

Leadership and Innovation

Management of Technology: Road mapping and Development

Management of Technology: Strategy and Portfolio Analysis

Machine Learning: From Data to Decisions

Cloud & DevOps: Continuous Transformation

MIT, Boston, MA, USA

Master of Digital Business Management

Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Master of Business Administration

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

Bachelor of Science in Engineering, Computer Science Newport University, Newport Beach, CA, USA

Credentials and certifications

• Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE), Microsoft

• Microsoft Certified Product Specialist (MCP), Microsoft

• Certified Novell Administrator, Novell

• ITIL Foundation Level, ITIL

• AWS Architecture

• Blue Coat ProxySG Administrator

Training & Development

Esade, Barcelona, Spain Advanced Marketing & Commercial Training Universidad, Barcelona, Spain Leading High Performing Teams Achieving Results

Turn to Face Customer

Global Business Unit

Legal Responsibilities

Responsible Business and Acting Principles

Artificial Intelligence and Ethics

Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

Competition Law

Business Principles

Big Data

Awareness of Privacy

Agile Fundaments

Technical Proficiencies

Programming & Tools C++, Pascal, Visual Basic, ASP, .NET, PHP, JAVA, FORTRAN, COBOL, Excel, MS Access, MS FoxPro, MySQL, Kubernetes, VMWare, MS Hyper-V, MS Cluster Servers.

Technologies Application Servers, Portals, Web Services, Cloud Services, Colocations, Data Center Operations, Data Warehousing, Data Mining, Big Data, Networks, DevOps.

Security & Systems Firewall, Routers, SSL, Encryption, PKI, SMTP, IMAP and POP3, Exchange Server, MS Windows, Citrix, Linux, Mac.

Wireless LAN/WAN, WEP, WAP, WPA, WPA2, TKIP, EAP, LEAP, Open System, Shared Key, CSMA/CA, Wi-Fi Planning, Wi-Fi Security, Antennas, Fresnel Zone, RF Tech.

Background

Languages Italian: Native

Spanish: Native

English: Fluent

Portuguese: Fluent

Places where I worked

and have people working

for me directly and

indirectly

USA (Florida, New York, California), LATAM (Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela), Cuba, Europe (Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany, Spain, Portuga, Kosovol), Dubai, China (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen), Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia.

Places where I lived for

work

Italy, Venezuela, Spain, Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Switzerland, China, and USA.

Team

Deputy CTO Responsible to Startup the presales, sales portfolio, Post-sales, IT, and define/develop strategic telco alliance with local partners

(commercial and providers) in Beijing: 20 Program Mangers direct report, and 100 people around the world indirect report.

Deputy CTO Responsible to develop UMTS Startup office in Rome and Zurich: 20 Managers direct report, and 60 people in Europe indirect report. Consein (Microsoft Gold Partner), Caracas, Venezuela, IT Manager: 10 Program Managers direct report.

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