Praveen Sharma

• Led and managed a global team responsible for the Data Center operation, capacity management of IBM Cloud’s IaaS infra, including VPC, VMWare, Classic, and Power VS services.
  •Drove efficiency improvement through contract negotiations and support renewals, optimizing cost and ensuring high-quality service delivery
  •Played a key role in the sales of $150M annual Cloud Services along with Sales, DC operations team.
  •Spearheaded the development and implementation of AI/ML-based analytical tools for DC monitoring, customer incident management, resulting in a 30% YoY resolution time(MTTR)
  •Successfully managed technical project managers, Customer Success Managers across multiple projects related to customer opportunities, expansions and new offerings launch
  •Oversaw global DC operations, ensuring adherence to change management, security and compliance standards across a multi-vendor networking environments (Cisco, Juniper, Arista, PaloAlto Networks, Fortinet and so on)
  •Raised customer satisfaction by building full-featured AI-based problem tracking and resolution systems: cut escalation resolution time 200%, cost saving of $37M in a year.
  •Collaborated with cross-functional teams (Sales, Product, Engineering) to drive business enablement positively impacting the revenue growth by 25% YoY.
  •Managed annual OPEX budgets related to hardware purchasing, refresh and negotiated EOS/EOL vendor contract renewals, saving $13.5M in 2024.

• Global Operational head - customer certification, deployment for Cisco's flagship Service Provider and Web portfolio with product revenue from $350M to a runrate of $1B/year.(in 5 years timeline)
  •Build a diverse high-performance team by effective mentorship, guidance and professional growth across the geographical regions.
  •Authored 25+ technical know-how documents assisting in Cisco IOS to XR platform, AI based chatbot troubleshooting FAQ. Developed in-house Business Access Management system significantly improving cross-functional efficiency and cost savings (250%).
  •Manage development and delivery of 1000s+ software patches for reliability and software release quality improvement.
  •Played a key role with sales, technical marketing team driving legacy migration for Cisco SD-WAN solutions on Azure, AWS and GCP, to grow market share by 17%.
  • Established performance metrics for monitoring team progress towards key objectives, driving accountability and implemented successful reward systems.
  •As a Customer Champion, led multiple Executive and Customer presentation across 20+ countries in EBC(Exec Briefing Center), SPCAB(Service Provided Customer Advisory Board), Cisco Live!, Cisco Connect, MWR conferences.

• Manage various test / customer organizations (development test, system test, scale / performance, automation, customer certification teams) in the C7200, C7500, C10000, C7600 and GSR (c12000) router platforms, with annual revenue of US $600+ million
  •Responsible for the strategic planning, setting the direction for the test group, and building strong test teams/leaders, program executions, budget management and product delivery
  •Development testing of various routing protocols, performance, HA and interoperability testing on C7200, C7500, Cisco 10K, C7600, GSR12K and DSL Routers
  •Authored 100+ self-troubleshooting documents on Routing platforms improving support experience.
• Established continuous feedback process with high-level customers, integrating their input into product release quality and greater satisfaction.
  •Won several recognitions by Management and Executive for automation and troubleshooting expert
  •Led several Demo/POCs Onsite and customer locations worldwide.

Additional experience: Engineering Manager at Mentor Graphics, Software Developer at NEC America, and Senior Scientific Officer at Indian Institute of Technology.