Salim El-Naaj

• Leading highly effective and diverse team of 23 Technical Account
  Managers focused on driving consumption and adoption of VMware Solutions, and guiding customers throughout their Digital Transformation Journey.
• Coaching teams on customer interaction and structuring engagements with different personas in customers organizations. Focus on identifying technical and business acumen gaps and facilitating self development through education and and biweekly progress reviews.
• Leading the Customer Success METNA business such as forecasting, pipeline generation, P&L management, margin and utilization optimization and reporting to SEMEA Customer Success business. Direct contribution to large account deal reviews and strategy with focus on post-sales success cycle.
• Established initiatives for Consumption Drive in EMEA region. Leading program for enabling customer use cases and themes to utilize their subscription. Areas included cost optimization, de-carbonization services, Cloud Capacity bursting, intrinsic security among others. ROI focused approach helped convert around 40% of subscription graded as shelf-ware in Management and monitoring solutions suite of 120+ customers across EMEA.
• Leading boost program for increasing reach of VMware Customer Success Program messaging to partners and customers to create new pipeline for opportunities in specialized engagements across VMware franchises. Customer Success boost generated 26% YoY growth in Customer Success revenue in METNA region, and 162% growth in Franchised CS Offerings.
• Building and maintaining executive customer relationships to solicit sentiment and areas of improvement for Customer Success programs. Communicating with and presenting to customer/internal executives and directors to articulate value of Customer Success Services and bespoke offerings.
• Built an extended network for our Customer Success team across business units, R&D and VMware Support to facilitate the best sources for our CS teams to offer the best support possible for our customers.

• Driving adoption of VMware solutions and roadmap as strategic advisor to Government and Health Care industry customers in UAE and Canada.
• Partnering with all levels of Customer Organizations their leadership teams, focusing on alignment of Business Requirements to technical solutions from VMware, to realize tangible outcomes in areas of High Availability, Performance, Automation, Security and Sustainability. Examples include Carbon Footprint tracking, building IT service catalogues for service brokers (Public/Private), and planning Migration Waves of virtual machines to Private Cloud.
• Working with large customers on initiatives for deploying Kubernetes through Tanzu services for Cloud Native apps on vSphere, OPEX and CAPEX control by reclaiming idle/unused resources and resizing workloads, and implementing best practices for hosting business critical apps on vSphere.
• Serve as subject matter expert in the region for Aria Automation solution and Aria Operations and Logs. Developing templates/serverless workflows for deploying complex IaaS and PaaS services using out of box services, and customization using JavaScript, python and PowerShell. Creating executive and tactical reports and dashboards for 360 degrees visibility on DC infrastructure and applications monitoring and management.
• Planning account activities with account managers, system engineers, professional services architects and sales to collaborate when working with customers on both commercial and technical fronts such as QBRs and RFP responses.
• Liaison with VMware Experts around the globe to assist customers with their technical and business requirements from R&D, Product Management, and Technical Support areas.
• Work closely with customer IT teams with focus on Customer's operational excellence throughout Day 2 of solution deployment. Facilitate creation of service improvement plans, best practice reviews, technical operational guidance, and customer resources skills development and enablement.
• Delivery of roadmaps sessions and technical presentations to wide range of customer audiences, enabling teams for positioning features and capabilities in their infrastructure and operations.
• Ownership of support issues and escalations for customers, including prioritization of high severity incidents, engagement with global support centers escalation teams, and ensuring customer satisfaction with level of support provided in high pressure and significant business impact scenarios.
• As Staff TAM, assisting team members with technical issues, training and development, and overall customer service advice, in addition to mentorship and coaching.

• Leading design and deployment of services ranging from full-hosting to providing Infrastructure as a Service model, for Sharjah E-Government Data Center.
• Leading team of ten infrastructure engineers to operate and deliver all infrastructure hosting services for Sharjah E-Government and their Government of Sharjah clients.
• Structuring of KPIs and tools, processes and procedures for supporting managed services environment and measuring service SLAs.
• Managing implementation of ITILv3 Framework across all IT services support and delivery functions including Service Desk, Technical Operations, and End user support
• Successfully establishing managed services catalogue that significantly reducing time to market for offered Sharjah E-Government services from weeks to days, by creating standardized service elements such as SOW, SLA, R&R, and service delivery and support processes.

Injazat (Now Core42) is major end-to-end IT services provider for many prominent government and semi-government entities of Abu Dhabi:

• Established and led Operations Readiness team to implement service assurance for contracted managed services and projects’ deployments, including development of plans [training, staffing, succession, skills matrix] for readiness to take on emerging technologies and new customers
• Infrastructure solutions including technical checklists, policies and procedures, service acceptance criteria, risk and issues management, and documentation templates reducing go-live timelines to operate implemented projects by 50%
• Streamlined communication channels between projects, implementation and operations team leading to single cross functional interface for customer interaction

• Management of 16 engineers for Network Operations Center that oversee Infrastructure Monitoring and Management Systems that serve over 20 government clients for 3000+ nodes, and 1500 servers, significantly improving KPI metrics for incident response and service availability.
• Standardization and Audit of implemented environments and documentation for standards compliance and quality to reduce service variability and induce quality management
• Technical support of ISO 20000 and ISO27001 initiatives and awarding in Injazat.

General Motors Account, Middle East and Africa region, Dubai:

• As part of network team for one of the largest MSP IT contracts at the time, I have managed applying global network policies and procedures for incident management, disaster recovery, and producing reports of availability and capacity to higher level management.