Contact me:

I’m the regional director for Rightscale, responsible for Australia, New Zealand, India and the ASEAN countries.

I’m passionate about cloud computing, great management, enterprise technology and making a difference in the world.

A background

The majority of my 18+ years IT have been in complex solution sales.

I started working in 1993. My first career was software development, of workflow and database systems. Several years later I moved into selling software engineering services instead of doing it myself. I was selling database-driven websites in 1999 back when it was harder to do.
In 2000 I joined IBM to sell infrastructure services to major clients in Melbourne and Canberra. I learned how to handle complex deals and to work in a big company.
Next I worked at Apple, selling their unix servers and storage to Federal government and last post-product houses and design firms. That division has been closed now, and I left as Apple became a consumer company. My heart has always been in enterprise.
In 2006 I joined Cisco services, and focused on complex sales to their top-tier clients. I’ve lived in the UK looking after BP and GE, and then returned to Sydney as part of the public sector sales team. For a time I also had responsibility for complex deal structuring, and Cisco’s local efforts to improve how they work with partners who themselves offer managed services to the market. This included infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and other utility-based commercial models across Asia-Pacific.
I left Cisco in October 2012 to join Rightscale as the country manager for Australia.

I’ve been involved in structuring utility, managed service and gain-sharing deals for hardware and services. I even did a diagram.

solution sales

My history and training

Prior to the big multinationals, I worked in small business – mostly in software. My first career was as a software developer and consultant.

I’ve had a lot of sales training, because each sales organisation likes to go through them a few times, including SPIN (twice), the Complex Sale from Rick Page, Solution Selling and Customer Centric Selling (twice).

Notably the best training I’ve had, on pretty much anything, has been in in executive presence from Stand and Deliver. The second-best would be IBM’s signature sales method, based on the TAS Group.

I’ve recently started studying a MSc of Strategic Planning with Heriot-Watt. Finding it really tough to find time for academic study amidst work and family life. The MSc is a follow-up to my MBA (International Business specialisation) completed five years ago with Uni of Southern Queensland.

Over the years I have been proud to work with some incredible organisations such as BP, GE and the Australian Department of Defence.

This has added up to a decent mix of industry experience:

Non-profits

I am deeply moved by the injustice in our global economic framework, and I can afford to make a difference. It’s long been a topic of some passion for me. In the long term, I’d like to volunteer my time on the boards of international development agencies.

I’m a significant financial supporter of Oxfam and a Kiva lender (micro-finance).

Personal and geeky

Some interesting dimensions that Linkedin won’t tell you.

I started programming in BASIC when I was 10 years old, later doing paid work with a teacher to develop software to teach Indonesian in grants funded by the government.
I am an MMO gamer, and often end up in guild or raid leadership. You actually learn a lot about virtual-team leadership from gaming (it’s been studied). Currently playing SWTOR, when I get the time (not often)
I’ve bought 32 books in the 12 months to now, April 2012 (I read a lot and hoard books too)
One of my web sites served 6.8M pageviews and 1.4M people between April 2010 and 2012, it’s about theorycraft in gaming.

I was also a professional musician for a while, with a recording label and played gigs around Australia.

I’m still a geek, with skills in webmaster tools such as wordpress, phpbb, cloudflare, invision power boards, statistics, social media and Linux servers. I tried learning to code in Ruby for fun and realised how rusty my code skills are.

I have a gorgeous wife and three wonderful children – one loves to read, another loves Lego and my baby loves watching them.

These personality profiles are accurate for me:

personality