University Of Maryland - Robert H. Smith School Of Business

Cloud Native Services - Product Management Director

Currently leading a strategic Program, as Product Strategy Director for the modernization / migration of key Oracle SaaS applications to Cloud Native technologies based on Docker Containers and Kubernetes. 

Previously, prior to June 2020, I led a team of Senior level product managers, and participated myself in strategic hands-on projects for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Cloud Native Services such as OKE / Managed Kubernetes, that include:

- Daily interactions with Engineering on features and schedule, 
tracking these via Jira / Confluence to meet priority customer needs
- Representing both External and Internal customer requirements for features, 
prioritizing these within Product Management and Engineering
- Keeping current on market changes with Kubernetes, Containers and Cloud Native technologies to help drive key product investments or partnerships
- Managing Business operations and metrics reporting for the portfolio of products within the PM team for executive visibility

In my day-to-day role, I work on the Developer Services and Cloud Native product management team that drives the lifecycle of managed cloud services including the Managed Kubernetes Service (OKE), Container Registry for Docker container images (OCIR), Functions as a Service (serverless) and API Gateway.  

The technologies that I specialize in are Cloud and Container Native Applications running as managed services in the Oracle public cloud (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure / OCI), listed here: 

- Managed Kubernetes - OKE - <a href="https://www.oracle.com/cloud/compute/container-engine-kubernetes.html">https://www.oracle.com/cloud/compute/container-engine-kubernetes.html</a>
- Managed Container Registry - OCIR - <a href="https://www.oracle.com/cloud/compute/container-registry.html">https://www.oracle.com/cloud/compute/container-registry.html</a>

Oracle

Product Strategy Director

StackEngine software provided out-of-the-box Docker / container application management, to compose, deploy and orchestrate your Docker container infrastructure.  This technology was created before Kubernetes entered the market, and proved to be an extremely easy to use, enterprise ready container management platform.  After the acquisition by Oracle, StackEngine became the basis for Oracle Container Cloud Service.

As employee number 2, in the capacities of Product Manager, Account Manager and Product Marketing, I focused on driving key feedback into product development and closing our initial customers, prior to acquisition by Oracle in December of 2015.

<a href="http://stackengine.com">http://stackengine.com</a>

StackEngine (acquired by Oracle)

VP Customer Success

As one of the original team members at the start up, CopperEgg (employee 7), I helped build a solid foundation around the B2B (business to business) go-to-market strategies that are in place today for this SaaS company.  

As VP of Sales, I built an automated sales and marketing machine with Salesforce and Marketo, that fed the CopperEgg SaaS app with new customers from over 50 countries around the world.  

Taking my knowledge of Enterprise sales, and adapting that into an automated sales engagement model, that drove a low touch, self service model.  

Today, CopperEgg is part of Idera Inc.  In 2014, my role expanded as the VP of Customer Service, to look after the install base of customers.  The approach was two pronged.  A proactive approach - Customer Success, and a more reactive, traditional approach with Customer Support. 

For Customer Success, I extended what I built for pre-sales, to focus on automated on boarding and customer life-cycle engagement to reduce churn, and maximize customer lifetime value (LTV).  This full life-cycle approach, or Customer Success effort, had very positive results in reducing churn and increasing customer satisfaction.

CopperEgg Corporation (acquired by Idera)

VP Customer Success / VP Sales - Cloud and Server Monitoring

I worked with our enterprise customers worldwide over the 2 years to drive the sales and adoption of Hyper9, which lead to the acquisition by SWI, announced on Jan 19, 2011. 

It was a great gig to help build this startup to a viable company, wearing many hats, including strategy work, product marketing / positioning as well as both direct and indirect sales.

Hyper9 (acquired by Solarwinds)

Account Executive / Director of Sales - Virtualization Management

I worked at Movero with a great group of motivated people.  I had direct responsibility for enterprise account sales with strategic mobility partners.  I built out the partner ecosystem with both strategic mobility partners such as Microsoft, as well as go to market partners, specifically providers of TEM software.

Movero Technology

Director of Sales

Working at Credant was a great experience in my career, continuing to work with a mission critical aspect of Security – Securing Data on devices such as laptops, smart phones and USB sticks, to mitigate the risk if the device was lost or stolen.  I managed a team and had responsibility for both the Channel Sales and Strategic Partner Alliances for the sales and market adoption of Credant software.

Credant Technologies (acquired by Dell)

Director, Channel Sales and Business Development

At Brightstream, I helped drive the partner ecosystem prior to the acquisition by nCipher.  I worked with key strategic technology partners, such as Microsoft, to build out the advanced use cases for things such as enterprise class SSL performance with Microsoft Exchange.

Britestream Networks

Director, Channel Sales and Marketing

Working at Microsoft in Redmond was a great experience.  It was intellectually challenging and rewarding.  The Security Business Unit was like a startup, inside of Microsoft.  The challenge was to work with our enterprise customers who were under attack by exploits against Microsoft software.

I worked with the various Windows product groups, helping to drive the education and awareness, through the field and direct outreach to our customers, of how to be more secure and how Microsoft was changing our processes and software to provide more secure computing.

Microsoft

Group Product Manager - Security Business Unit

Partnerware was a great experience working with a solid team of channel experts, to help our customers define their partner engagement processes.  We were able to define and integrate these best practices into the Partnerware SaaS based PRM system.

Partnerware

VP Business Services

At Tivoli, I had responsibility for advancing strategic partner technology and business development relationships with key alliances in support new business directions.

Tivoli Systems

Strategic Partner Manager

At TIS, I drove the technology partner ecosystem for complementary security technologies to the TIS firewall.  I directed all aspects of go-to-market strategy for the partner products, from the creation of the Advantage Plus partner program (A+), to working with our field sales organization.

TIS was acquired by Network Associates (McAfee) in April of 1998

Trusted Information Systems

ISV Partner Product Manager

I always wanted to work for Compaq.  I got the opportunity to join the organization, just after the darkest days of the "clone wars"  Compaq was on a down turn.

I started my career there in the field sales org as a strategic account manager, and had the privilege of working with the company from $3B to $20B, and emerging as  the top PC company in the world.  We brought the first low cost Compaq desktops to market, the prolinea and i series.  This changed the tide with our enterprise customers and paved the way for dominance in both the desktop and server market with the proliant.

The opportunity arose though to take a position at Corporate in Houston.  An IT management position.  This was a great career move to drive the IT side of app development for our worldwide sales and marketing applications.  We created a CRM application called AIM, which helped Compaq move its field from expensive office real estate to home office.  This was ground breaking at the time and was acclaimed by Forbes magazine.  I also was lucky enough to work with the new Internet teams at Compaq to understand how we could best leverage this “new” resource for commercial business.  Crazy to think that now, but in 1994, this was new thought.  Just solving the issue of how does a field sales person send an email, outside of the Compaq banyan network, to a customer was a challenge.  Or how to solve the challenge of knowing our current inventory and sales numbers through the channel.  This drove the need for a system of record, known as WWISRD, that could receive feeds from our channel partners.  It was a great experience to bring these systems online.  I even have heard that WWISRD is still in use today at HP.  By the way, the acronym stood for world wide inventory and sales repository of data for those interested.

Hewlett-Packard / Compaq

IT Director, Enterprise Sales Systems

At Toshiba, I managed a 7 state territory, supervising 5 channel reps, with a book of business of over $50 million per year.

Mike Raab