SHANE SMITH
VP Information Technology
Houston,TX
Summary
Performance-driven Vice President with 20 years of experience aligning systems with business requirements, policies and regulatory requirements.
A collaborative consensus builder with excellent organization and communication skills and a reputation as the enterprise customer's trusted advisor and advocate often filling the "winning the business" role during pre-sales then acting as the "face and voice the customer knows" post-implementation.
As a passionate builder of teams, and supporting management, I've maintained a record of extremely low employee turnover in an industry known for high churn.
A combination of soft-skills with a strong technical acumen and a rich history of complex system & architecture design (logical & physical) has resulted in success in a range of roles spanning "principle engineer/architect" through to full IT Org leader and evangelist.
Overview
27
27
years of professional experience
Work History
Contract: Data Science, Architecture and Analytics
Self
Various, TX
06.2021 - Current
- Utilized advanced querying, visualization (Tableau, Power BI) and analytics tools to analyze and process complex data sets of 20M IoT devices.
- Applied statistical and algebraic techniques to forecast cost of maintenance and labor along with expected device failure rates.
- Unified disparate data structures and operating environments during revamps of processes, data pipelines, and data storage & curation strategies
- Incorporated cloud architecture into new facility planning, reducing need for on-site equipment and technical support personnel.
- Evaluated third-party ML & AI vendors for customer's needs and fit
DS4A Data Science Fellowship
Correlation ONE
NYC, NY
04.2021 - 09.2021
- Rigorous, competitive, testing and application process reduced applicant pool from 30,000 to ~1000
- Extended Case projects: analytics of full NOAA storm dataset for pre- and post- Katrina FEMA Reform Act, review of NYC’s progress on traffic accidents, injuries and casualties post implementation of Vision Zero.
- Capstone: Analysis of Seattle Police Department’s long-term trends and correlations across use-of-force, Terry stops, crisis intervention and crimes.
- Presented findings orally and in writing with advanced mathematical models.
- Ran statistical analyses within software to process large datasets.
- Tested and validated models for accuracy of predictions in outcomes of interest.
- Utilized Python, Jupyter, Google Colab, seaborn, Pandas, scikit-Learn, matplotlib, Folium, numpy, Penguin, Tableau, Power BI, etc.
- Completed program “with honors” September ’21.
Vice President
Fusion Connect, Inc
Atlanta, Georgia
12.2016 - 06.2021
- Spearheaded cross-functional initiatives across departments to achieve business goals for bottom-line profits.
- Led, architected, executed integration & consolidation/collapse of six acquired company's corporate back offices and 12+ product platforms in 18-mo period.
- Simultaneously and successfully defended multi-million dollar Oracle, Red Hat, VMware VSPP, Microsoft SPLA and Quest audits.
- Detected and successfully mitigated, in real time, earliest of advanced ransomware attacks now plaguing industry.
- Initiated conversion of “all shrink-wrap” licensing model to fully M365 & Azure model for corporate systems.
- Leveraged deep technical understanding of Microsoft Windows, Exchange, PowerShell, VMware, *NIX, storage & compute to guide technical team's successes.
- Achieved above with single voluntary headcount churn.
Sr. Vice President Information
Apptix, INC
Herndon, VA
05.2012 - 11.2016
- Apptix was leading Hosted Exchange service provider in US with over 20,000 customers and 500,000 users prior to sale of its public cloud customer base to GoDaddy, LLC in 2015
- Led restructuring and turnaround through development of new leadership team.
- Developed and implemented new strategies and policies to establish long-term business objectives and provide strong and sustainable organizational leadership.
- Modeled all platform components (utilizing combination of Splunk, PERL & Python) from discrete remote client through atomic level hardware metrics and deeply interwoven application tiers to uncover root causes of performance issues.
- Built advanced analytics and statistical tools for workload reshaping, capacity forecasting and cost analysis with spillover insights for Marketing, Product and Finance teams.
- Rebuilt low productivity, high cost, teams down from 45% of SaaS company’s headcount to less than 25% while improving availability from 95% to 99.1% in under six months as call volume dropped 50% and customer churn improved by 90%.
- Motivated teams to accelerate software & platform upgrade delivery six-fold in18-mo.
- Architected platform for 4x growth in customer count as marketplace "commoditization" required 3x improvement in performance density.
- Accomplished above with two voluntary headcount churn.
Vice President Architecture
Apptix, Inc
Herndon, VA
01.2010 - 04.2012
- Acted as company's presale and post-implementation "technical face to the customer" for major production studios, international airfreight and national (water) search-and-rescue entities, presidential candidates, marque think tanks and major VC funds.
- Deployed and populated a 250K mailbox Hosted Microsoft Exchange platform for nation’s second largest NFP healthcare provider in less under 6-mo. Resulting platform experienced less than 9-min of unplanned downtime in 47-months.
- Spearheaded cross-functional initiatives across departments to achieve business goals for bottom-line profits.
- Evaluated product development strategies and prepared alternative approaches to goal achievement.
- Resolved issues and recommended actions based on production and compliance (SOC, HIPAA, ITAR) reports.
Director IT Operations
Network Solutions
Herndon, VA
01.2004 - 01.2010
- Built one of earliest >20M site hosting platforms with 10s of millions of domain names and 10s of thousands of early Internet hosted storefronts.
- Designed platform to handle billions of files per hour at CAPEX cost 1/10th that of commercial solutions then available.
- Built and managed extensive, "distributed orchestration" toolset for data integrity validation and reconstruction utilizing dozens of micro component scripts to touch 100s of billions of files, and tens of terabytes, per hour.
- Oversaw day-to-day production activities in accordance with business objectives.
- Evaluated performance, adjusted strategies and maintained agile, sustainable operations.
- Grew team from two to 68 with company leading employee retention rate of 97% (3-headcount voluntary churn between 2001 and 2010).
- Used critical thinking to break down problems, evaluate solutions and make decisions
Various Management Roles
VeriSign & Network Solutions
Herndon, VA
10.1997 - 12.2003
- Developed proposals and presentations for internal and external audiences.
- Conducted performance evaluations, compensations and hiring to maintain appropriate staffing requirements.
- Consolidated vendors and renegotiated contracts to optimize costs.
- Onboarded new employees with training and new hire documentation.
Junior System Administrator
SAIC
Reston, VA
06.1996 - 09.1997
- Facilitated IT enterprise architecture across organization's enterprise transformation programs.
- Managed infrastructure upgrades, analysis and resolution of end user hardware and software issues.
- Maintained and deployed upgrades for a.root-servers.net and j.root-servers.net
- Generated, QA'd and published .COM, .NET and .ORG zone files for nightly propagation
- Generated, QA'd and published nightly WHOIS database.
Education
Bachelor of Science Meteorology conferred - Atmospheric Sciences And Meteorology
Lyndon State College
Lyndonville, VT 05.1996 - 05.1996
Skills
Organizational, Employee & Customer Relationship building and retention
Analytical and Critical Thinking
Communication and Presentation
Virtual & Physical Infrastructure Architecture
Intelligence gathering & Statistical analysis
Performance & cost metrics analysis
Management information systems
Infrastructure: VMware, EMC/NetApp/HP, UCS
Technical: Python, PERL, Splunk, PowerShell, etc
Additional Information
- Activities and Societies: , Vermont State Colleges Student Trustee 1994 – 1995 & ’95 – ’96 (the only two term student trustee) President Student Association 1993 – ‘94
Work Availability
monday
tuesday
wednesday
thursday
friday
saturday
sunday
morning
afternoon
evening
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Quote
I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.
Simone Weil
Timeline
Contract: Data Science, Architecture and Analytics
Self
06.2021 - Current
DS4A Data Science Fellowship
Correlation ONE
04.2021 - 09.2021
Vice President
Fusion Connect, Inc
12.2016 - 06.2021
Sr. Vice President Information
Apptix, INC
05.2012 - 11.2016
Vice President Architecture
Apptix, Inc
01.2010 - 04.2012
Director IT Operations
Network Solutions
01.2004 - 01.2010
Various Management Roles
VeriSign & Network Solutions
10.1997 - 12.2003
Junior System Administrator
SAIC
06.1996 - 09.1997
Bachelor of Science Meteorology conferred - Atmospheric Sciences And Meteorology
Lyndon State College
05.1996 - 05.1996