Management Development
Resume:
STEVEN A. SMITH
Austin, TX 78732
f5zs42@r.postjobfree.com
Professional Overview
Steven Smith has over 20 years of high-tech experience primarily in the areas of systems management, data center automation, business process management, and integration-related technologies. He currently works as a consultant for Cisco Systems, serving as the CTO of their Intelligent Automation Business Unit. Steven has held such positions in the past as VP of Engineering and CTO of FiveRuns, SVP of Engineering and CTO of Tonic Software, SVP of Engineering of Neon Systems, and VP of Engineering and CTO of Relational Development.
During his career, Steven has excelled in a number of strategic roles that included product strategies, go-to-market strategies, and corporate development initiatives. Steven has also excelled in executive positions where he was responsible for the entire application lifecycle, consistently delivering high-quality software on time while employing a wide variety of development methodologies, such as Waterfall, XP, and Scrum.
Steven has a passion for new technologies and has been fortunate throughout his career to have been able to remain very adept with even the most current of technology trends, development methodologies, programming languages, and technologically-advanced architectures. He currently has seven patents pending in the areas of low overhead data collection methodologies for business application transactions, tracing and diagnosis of problematic transactions, cross-system business application tracing utilizing a tagging and token-based methodology, and a means of detecting memory leaks within various business application frameworks.
Steven holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Troy State University with minors in Business Administration, Economics, and Mathematics.
Professional Experience
Cisco Systems, Inc. 2008 to present
San Jose, CA
Cisco’s Intelligent Automation Business Unit’s focus is to simplify scheduling and performance in all customer enterprises, regardless of datacenter complexity. Our products improve the efficiency of IT operations and general application performance in any environment. The Intelligent Automation Business Unit was formed by the acquisition of Tidal Software, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in May 2009.
CTO, Intelligent Automation Services Business Unit
As the CTO of the Intelligent Automation Business Unit, I serve as a senior member of the executive management team, and work closely with the unit’s GM on a variety of special projects. I am responsible for overall product architectures and integrations while serving as the unit’s chief architect and am responsible for opportunities to integrate and leverage individual products and architectural components for more complete product offerings and faster product time to market. Also, am responsible for identifying strategic go-to-market opportunities and analyzing market trends and contributing to product directions. The Intelligent Automation Business Unit was formed with the acquisition of Tidal Software.
• Served on the team that was put in place to define Cisco’s cloud reference architecture which led to the selection of the Tidal Enterprise Automation product being chosen as the component responsible for driving all resource imaging and provisioning
• Developed a new platform architecture that all future performance management and automation products would use which led to a more efficient use of development resources and a consistent architecture for our products
• Evaluated the software development processes that were in place and made recommendations that improved communication and software delivery predictability
• Established an architectural committee which included both local and distributed architects in order to increase knowledge flow between the teams
• Was a core member of a strategic team whose mission was to study Tidal’s go-to-market strategy, existing products, and to identify additional product and market opportunities
• Took a close look at Tidal’s products and product components identifying a number of integration opportunities which led to Tidal’s Custom Application Automation Strategy
• Helped change the company’s go-to-market focus from a scheduling and application performance management perspective to an enterprise application automation perspective
• Worked closely with the engineering teams to solve architectural problems and set direction of future product architectures
• Evaluated all open source usage at Tidal for attribution and license compliance and came up with a methodology of approving open source usage in the future
• Reviewed two of Tidal’s existing patent applications that had been rejected on numerous occasions and reworked the patent strategies resulting in one patent being published and the other still under consideration by the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO)
• Wrote articles and gave presentations relative to Tidal’s business and product strategy for various magazines and user groups
FiveRuns Corp.
2005 to 2008
Austin, Texas
FiveRuns provided performance and availability monitoring, and event management software developed for a variety of computing platforms and subsystems including Ruby on Rails, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, Oracle, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Windows. FiveRuns targeted small-to-medium sized businesses in need of modern systems management tools with a low barrier to entry by leveraging a Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model. FiveRuns was active in the open source community and was one of the original sponsors of the Ruby on Rails Conference in 2005. FiveRuns was acquired by WorkThink in 2008.
Vice President, Engineering, and CTO
Founded FiveRuns in February 2005 with the goal of bringing a smarter, simpler solution to the systems management space. Developed and refined FiveRuns’ product strategy through extensive market research, focus groups, and interviews with IT professionals across the US. Raised venture funding of over $9 million through series A and B financings.
• Directed market research efforts during the seed round, defining the company’s go-to-market strategy and initial product development goals
• Directed the company through its series-A financing enabling the company to recruit the initial development and product management staff
• Served as the chief architect for the FiveRuns software including the selection of Ruby on Rails as its backend and web-development frameworks scaling to over 10,000,000 host interactions per day
• Recruited the user-interface (UI) design team and led them to one of the most intuitive and easy-to-use products in the systems management arena, being recognized by SXSW Interactive as one of the top three sites in the nation in the creative usage of CSS
• Was directly responsible for a significant portion of the FiveRuns UI, leveraging Ruby on Rails as the Web framework, AJAX interactions utilizing JavaScript, as well as HTML and CSS
• Established the company's Rails Advisory Council consisting of twelve of the most high-profile individuals in the Rails community
• Represented the company at various user group meetings including presentations at the Austin on Rails user group and the Rails conference in 2005, 2006, and a keynote in 2007
• Developed the company’s post series B’s go-forward-market strategy and the requisite product feature set to align with that strategy
• Directed the strategic positioning of the company resulting in FiveRuns being named one of the "Ten Management Companies to Watch" by Denise Dubie of Network World
Tonic Software, Inc. 2002 to 2004
Austin, Texas
Tonic Software provided software solutions for business transaction assurance that combined end-user experience management, Web infrastructure management and J2EE and .NET transaction management. Tonic was acquired by Altiris in December 2004.
Senior Vice President, Engineering, and CTO
As a senior member of the executive management team, was primarily responsible for all technical operations including software engineering, customer support, quality assurance, and product documentation as well as product management. Joined Tonic as a result of the Covasoft acquisition and crafted the initial product integration strategy. Served as the company’s technical representative in high-profile customer accounts as well advised on strategic business development matters. Worked closely with the CEO on operational issues and go-to-market strategies.
• Organized Tonic’s development activities resulting in the first on-time product release in the company’s history
• Instituted a process that greatly improved product quality, increasing overall customer satisfaction and maximizing development resource utilization
• Assisted in the acquisition of Appliant, a passive-monitoring company with technology highly complementary to the Tonic and Covasoft product lines
• Directed the integration of the Tonic, Covasoft, and Appliant product lines into a complementary product suite, while maintaining the ability to market and sell each independently
• Designed, architected, and developed a low-overhead transaction management product that provided visibility into the lifecycle of J2EE and .NET transactions across distributed infrastructure components
• Instituted and utilized an agile development methodology (XP – extreme programming variant) which greatly improved visibility into the development process as well as improved predictability in terms of release progress
Covasoft, Inc. Summer 2002 to Fall 2002 (acquired by Tonic)
Austin, Texas
Covasoft provided software solutions for e-business application management and web infrastructure management with a focus on Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) environments and was acquired by Tonic Software in November 2002.
Vice President, Products
As a senior member of the executive management team, was primarily responsible for all software development as well as product management activities. Was brought in by the company’s lead investor and CEO to define the long-term product strategy and assist with venture financing and company exit strategies. Worked closely on corporate development matters and identified the strategic partner that eventually acquired the company. Worked closely with the CEO on operational matters and go-to-market strategies.
• Evaluated the current product set and product roadmap and identified several key strategic initiatives that ultimately improved the company’s overall market position
• Designed and architected a transaction management product that provided visibility into the lifecycle of J2EE transactions across distributed infrastructure components that was the key to the Tonic acquisition
• Was instrumental in the process led to the company’s acquisition, identifying company and product synergies as well as defining deal structure and term
Neon Systems, Inc. 1998 to 2002
Houston, Texas
Neon Systems provided software solutions for the integration marketplace consisting of data access, enterprise application integration (EAI) and business-to-business integration (B2Bi) offerings.
Senior Vice President, Engineering
As a senior member of the executive management team, was primarily responsible for all Software Development as well as Product Management activities while functionally serving as the company’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the last two years. Joined Neon prior to its public offering and worked initially from a remote office in Columbus, Georgia to enhance the existing product set’s marketability and salability. Moved to the company headquarters in Sugar Land, Texas in the Fall of 1999 at the request of the CEO to be more involved in the growth of the company and was promoted to Vice President, Product Development. Promoted to Senior Vice President, Product Development, under a new management team brought in to refine Neon’s business model in October of 2000. Worked closely with the new President and COO to define and implement the corporate strategy and operating plan as well as to identify tactical go-to-market opportunities.
• Created the company’s first strategic product plan which identified both market opportunities and the requisite product feature set needed to exploit those opportunities
• Directed the expansion of the product set to include non-mainframe integration offerings, B2B e-commerce offerings, and business process management offerings resulting in Neon being selected by EAI Journal as 3rd place Vendor of the Year in 2001
• Established and directed the implementation of the company’s Java and XML strategies which included JDBC, JCA, Servlet, XML and SOAP-based offerings
• Organized Neon’s Development activities and brought structure to the software development process, while simultaneously focusing Neon’s tactical and strategic development activities on core business opportunities
• Established and directed multiple offshore development initiatives consisting of teams in Siberia and India
• Developed a Release Management process that facilitated the involvement of other functional areas within the company in order to optimize product time-to-market and communicate release-specific information in a timely manner
• Served as the chief technology and product liaison for high profile customer accounts, assisting in pre-sales efforts as well as strategic account management initiatives
• Provided strategic guidance in marketing and business development matters as it pertained to overall corporate and product strategy and positioning
• Participated in merger and acquisition activities from the identification, strategic alignment, technical due diligence, and valuation perspectives
• Performed Executive Briefings across the country, spoke at user conferences, and performed interviews with various trade magazines and Internet-based industry portals
• Made numerous presentations to the Board of Directors regarding corporate and product strategy and participated in industry and financial analyst briefings
Relational Development, Inc.
1991 to 1998
Columbus, Georgia
Relational Development provided database performance and systems management software for the mainframe as well as distributed computing environments. Relational Development was bootstrapped without venture financing.
Vice President, Engineering, and CTO
Founded Relational Development, Inc. after returning to AFLAC with an agreement in place to utilize AFLAC’s computing systems in off-hours for non-competitive development purposes. The initial offering was The Accelerator for DB2, a product targeted at improving query response time by minimizing physical database IOs. The Accelerator employed a dynamic caching subsystem that exploited native memory stores inherent on IBM mainframe systems. After being approached by several independent software vendors regarding the sale of The Accelerator in the Fall of 1992, sold the product to BMC Software, Inc. of Sugar Land, Texas in April 1993. After the acquisition by BMC, began development of PowerVision, a cross-platform, distributed computing framework initially targeted at performance management, with development completion in the Fall of 1995. After negotiations with several large independent software vendors, sold PowerVision to Softworks, Inc. of Alexandria, Virginia in Fall of 1996 to form the basis of their CenterStage/MP (Multi-Platform) product set which contributed in part to their 1998 IPO and subsequent acquisition by EMC for $192 million.
AFLAC, Inc. 1991 to 1993
Columbus, Georgia
Senior Performance Analyst
Reporting to the Director of Technical Services, was responsible for the optimum performance of all AFLAC’s MVS images and all MVS-based subsystems. Additionally, was responsible for the capacity planning function in order to ensure adequate computing capacity for future growth. Performed briefings for upper management regarding CPU and hardware recommendations required to support AFLAC’s ongoing operations. Worked in a joint AFLAC US-Japan task force to establish global disaster recovery procedures.
Legent Corporation 1990 to 1991
Vienna, Virginia
Senior Product Developer
Worked primarily on AccuMAX for DB2, a performance management tool for DB2 environments and TSO/MON, a specialized TSO performance management and reporting utility. Developed a native VTAM interface for the AccuMAX product as well as re-architected the user interface to be more CUA compliant. Conducted training classes for the various development groups as well as assisted them in problem diagnosis activities.
AFLAC, Inc. 1986 to 1990
Columbus, Georgia
Manager, Technical Services
Originally hired as a systems programmer, was quickly promoted to Manager of Technical Services which included responsibility for the installation and configuration of all MVS system images and MVS-based subsystems and third-party software. Additionally, was responsible for all performance management and capacity planning functions.
West Point Pepperell, Inc. 1985 to 1986
West Point, Georgia
Systems Programmer
Joined West Point Pepperell as an entry-level systems programmer out of college. Had responsibility for the installation and maintenance of all the MVS system images and participated in the groups responsible for the DOS / VSE systems.
Education
Troy State University 1981 to 1985
Troy, Alabama
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science
Minors in Business Administration, Economics, and Mathematics
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