SUMMARY

• Experienced technical architect with ability to sell, deliver, and manage complex on - premise and cloud-based projects while effectively coordinating resources and communicating with key stakeholders. Consistently evaluates technical requirements, budget, and progress against timeline to drive a successful completion of established objectives.

TECHNICAL EXPERTISE

• Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Services
• Azure Site Recovery
• Hyper-V
• Cisco Meraki and other networking appliances
• Azure ARM & Azure automation
• Failover Clustering
• Azure Active Directory
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager
• Office 365: Exchange, SharePoint, Skype
• Remote Desktop Services
• Windows Server and Active Directory
• Storage (Dell MD Series/EqualLogic, Nimble)
• Active Directory Federation Services
• IIS Web Server Migration
• Identity Management
• Exchange Server 2007, 2010, 2013

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Confidential, Chicago, IL

Cloud Solution Architect

Responsibilities:

• Drove sales process via development of proposals and statements of work, and through the creation of cloud PowerBI dashboards used to estimate implementation and consumption costs as part of pre-sales process.
• Architected and implemented large scale Azure IaaS projects and provided technical oversight for additional Azure projects frequently balancing time between up to four (4) concurrent projects and sales initiatives.
• Provided technical insight in the creation of Azure Datacenter Transformation service kit, bill of materials, and solution offering to improve delivery consistency and reduce duplication of effort.

Confidential, St. Louis, MO

Principal Consultant / Cloud Practice Lead

Responsibilities:

• Developed nascent cloud practice to over $1,000,000 in revenue annually in under three (3) years.
• Telecommunications: Brought in to save failing Azure Site Recovery project. Successfully configured disaster recovery and identified and resolved networking issues in less than 1 week.
• Social Welfare: Crafted requirements for all technical needs for multi-million dollar start up. Target architecture was entirely cloud-based, leveraging Azure PaaS and IaaS as well as OMS, Office 365, and Azure Security Center. Utilized Cisco Meraki networking equipment on-premise to further support ease of centralized management.
• Real Estate Development & Management: Called in to assist IT Manager with unexpected storage shortfall after deployment of new block-level Nimble device. Migrated Hyper-V 2008 R2 cluster to Windows Server 2012 to leverage new trim/unmap functionality, thereby restoring over 2 TB in lost capacity, allowing the IT manager to forgo the purchase of an unbudgeted $25,000 storage shelf. To further maximize project value, added a third host to the Hyper-V cluster and deployed VMM 2012 to manage the new infrastructure.
• Manufacturing: Subject matter expert for greeting card company deploying Windows InTune to capture auditing and control processes over previously unmanaged workstations.
• Manufacturing: Migrated 1200 mailboxes to Office 365 in complex 3-leg design involving dual hybrid Exchange servers in one AD environment and Exchange Federated Delegation in a second AD environment. The project requirements mandated mailbox migrations be executed concurrently with user and workstation migrations which further added to the challenge. Despite many hurdles, successfully completed migrations prior to customer deadline and received 5 out of 5 in customer satisfaction.
• Retail Services: Sold, designed, managed, and delivered end to end migration of Office 365 email, messaging, and collaboration services for 350 new and existing employees under a tight timeline for a Midwest retail servicing company as part of a new business contract acquisition with a high-profile multinational manufacturer.
• Manufacturing: Delivered System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 proof of concept to $6B consumer goods manufacturer.
• Information Services: Brought in to revitalize beleaguered Active Directory Federation Service deployment project for $1B information services company. Project was suffering from a series of setbacks and was paying substantial daily contractual penalties as a result. In less than three (3) weeks, the project was back on track and penalty free.
• Publishing and Design: Architected, organized, and delivered a staged large-scale mailbox migration from failing Exchange 2003 server to Exchange Online as part of an Office 365 rollout. By converting to Exchange Online, risk exposure from faulting hardware was greatly reduced, thereby freeing IT to refocus on core business initiatives.
• Financial Services: Designed and deployed Hyper-V POC as branch office solution for global financial services company to contribute to cost savings well in excess of $150,000 annually as part of long term strategy to displace VMWare.
• Faith Services: Architected hybrid migration to move three hundred and seventy-five (375) mailboxes for national faith-based services organization to Exchange Online. Adding to the challenge, the solution was deployed during the beta phase of Office 365, leading to the discovery of several high-profile product flaws, which were overcome through the use of deep inspection tools. Final solution was delivered with fully federated Active Directory and Exchange, and contributed to cost savings by eliminating the need to rehire a retiring email administrator at a cost of over $70,000 annually.
• Retail Services: Established requirements and drove RFP review for extensive cloud vendor selection process. Architected migration for mission critical production web application to chosen vendor for $50M+ retail services company. Planned, built and executed complex, coordinated migration of six (6) interconnected servers, including a core LOB application, SQL Server databases, Remote Desktop Services, Access databases, Active Directory Server, and autoprocess server. By moving to cloud, services were no longer susceptible to single point of failure network and sub-six hour battery backup systems. Successful migration helped company secure net new $10M+ contract with global retailer.
• Higher Education: Migrated all student mailboxes from on-premise Exchange 2003 to Live@edu. Ensured integration with faculty and staff email distribution lists and developed Powershell scripting solutions to automate student mailbox provisioning and de-provisioning process.
• Real Estate Development and Management: Installed Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 in multi-node failover cluster on Dell PowerEdge R715 servers against a Dell MD3000i SAN. Designed and built LUNs on disk groups utilizing RAID1 and RAID5. VHDs created for system and data storage migrated from physical to virtual using custom-built Powershell scripts. Guest servers included Sage Timberline Office, File and Print servers, and SQL Server. In order to facilitate management of new virtual environment, SCVMM 2008 R2 was installed and configured to integrate with a new SCOM server implementation. Resulting solution freed up much needed rack space and improved overall performance and flexibility for datacenter resources.
• Construction & Roofing: Migrated critical server running file and print, terminal services, Active Directory, DNS and Timberline Office to a new server. Involved migrating Operations Master roles and upgrading Timberline Office from version 9.4.1 to 9.7. Also, assisted with purchase and installation of 6 new workstations. Configured Backup Exec Recovery Point software, set up centralized scanning solution, and configured group policy and ACLs to improve security and access control.
• Construction - General: Led team in migrating single application server running IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003 IIS to a virtual platform. Resulting solution consisted of a total of four virtual servers - organized as two sets of two servers which were identical and redundant. They were positioned behind an F5 which acted as a failover mechanism using offset load balancing. One set ran Windows Server 2008 R2 (IIS 7.5) with essentially static content. The second set of servers provided single sign on for multiple web servers across the enterprise using Oracle Identity and Access Server. The final implementation showed measureable improvement in supportability and fault tolerance for several critical internal application services.
• Higher Education: Designed and delivered highly available Hyper-V solution consisting of two fully redundant two-node clusters in separate sites running Windows Server 2008 R2 on HP Proliant DL585 G6 Servers against a Dell EqualLogic PS6500. Final solution hosted student and department file share server for a large Midwest university, and successfully introduced the university to virtualization helping them to realize strong gains in both reliability and performance.
• Education: Migrated Exchange 2003 CAS and Mailbox servers to multiple Exchange 2010 virtual servers. Provided high availability in a multi-site network through the use of Exchange’s High availability solution, Database Availability Group, or DAG. The DAG included a total of six databases across four virtual servers configured for full redundancy through the use of multiple active and passive nodes. Four client access servers were also added and published through Microsoft’s ISA 2006 firewall. The client experienced higher performance and fewer outages as a result of this implementation.
• Construction - General: Worked with an international team to provide a single sign on solution between Peachtree and SharePoint from Germany to New York. As a result of a company acquisition, these companies required seamless access to each other’s portals.
• Real Estate Development & Management: Assisted customer in emergency outage situation after they had transitioned to new office space in an effort to correct a broken ISA 2006 access policy.
• Real Estate Development & Management: Provided assistance to customer seeking to configure Forefront Online Protection for Exchange. The effort was designed to eliminate the cost and complexity associated with an in-house email hygiene solution from Barracuda networks. The off-premise FOPE solution reduced management overhead and eliminated the need to purchase a lengthy and costly service contract for existing Barracuda server while providing an improved level of protection.

Confidential

Consultant, St. Louis, MO

Responsibilities:

• Worked as subcontractor under Dell Corporation to deliver MED-V and APP-V as part of a Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) proof of concept to a $1B Midwest financial institution. Completed project provided a compatible platform for running mission critical application and enable on-time global rollout of Windows 7.
• Designed and delivered highly available Hyper-V solution consisting of a fully redundant two node cluster running Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 on Dell PowerEdge R410 Servers against a Dell MD3000i. Final solution provided proof of concept and led to fifteen (15) site rollout with significant uptime improvements over previous solution.

Confidential

IT Professional Evangelist

Responsibilities:

• Crafted multi-city plan to develop a cohesive IT Professional community for facilitating the flow of technical information between Microsoft and its customers. The plan ultimately led to a 4-point improvement in customer satisfaction (NSAT) and was recognized as a best practice across the organization.
• Created first-ever, presentation-ready, Windows Server 2008 R2 DirectAccess and BranchCache technical content at Microsoft. Content comprised slides, demonstration scripts, and Hyper-V images and was successfully delivered to thousands of IT Professionals across the U.S. with scores exceeding 8.0 on a 9.0 point scale.
• Recognized as key contributor to the Microsoft Security Content Review Board (SCRB) in 2007, 2008, and 2009. Board responsibilities comprised review and final approval of all security-related technical information disseminated by Microsoft, including books, whitepapers and slide decks. This was a voluntary position taken on to improve the quality of Microsoft’s customer-facing content and to further my security technical proficiency.
• Advanced customer technical readiness by presenting deep drill down walkthroughs on a wide array of Microsoft products and technologies including Windows Server (from NT4 forward), Windows client (from Windows 2000 forward), Exchange Server (from Exchange 5.5 forward), Active Directory, Microsoft Office (all varieties) ISA Server, MDOP, Forefront (all varieties), cloud computing, Hyper-V, Virtual PC, wireless security, SQL Server (from SQL 2000 forward), System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) and System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM).
• Furthered community and consumer relations by establishing weekly reports with community group leaders. Ongoing profiling revealed that this action spurred Microsoft community growth as much as 50% in affected cities.
• Contributed to reducing 10 person team travel costs by over 15% by recommending new efficiencies, including car sharing, multi-city trips, and multi-presentation weeks.
• Selected as member of key 5-person leadership team tasked with shaping FY10 strategy. Personally presented the completed plan to V.P. level who accepted and adopted it for a larger 30 person department.

Sr. TechNet Presenter

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• Pioneered and managed Microsoft’s TechNet Chat program from 2005-2007. Successfully connected Microsoft’s top technical resources to thousands of live attendees and over a quarter million transcript downloads.
• Personally delivered over 650 live technical presentations on Microsoft client and server technologies from 2002 to 2009.
• Delivered compelling jointly developed technical content to customer audiences as large as 6500 people, utilizing Powerpoint, live demonstrations, and audience participatory techniques to help promote new and existing products.
• Achieved multiple certifications and awarded several pay grade promotions during tenure.

Associate Technology Specialist, Chicago, IL

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• Drove district desktop revenue YOY growth of 103% during tenure, surpassing growth rates of other districts across the country.
• Assisted customers in overcoming pre-sales technical objections related to infrastructure technologies. Beat out 11 other districts to be awarded top district in 1999.
• Excelled to become the first Windows 2000 MCSE in a District of over one hundred people.