About Laurence Grant


Laurence Grant

If you are looking to build your team with proven contributors who can develop new capabilities and lift a good operation to higher levels, then I think we should speak.  I would like to discuss how my achievements as a visionary and leader in the areas of virtualization and cloud computing, and discuss how my passion for technology can benefit your business.

Utilizing my IT, operations and executive management experience, I have achieved competitive advantage by creating operating efficiencies, increasing productivity and improving bottom line profits in high-tech environments. More specifically,  I have utilized technology and its management for competitive advantage for Billion Dollar companies, including Oracle Corporation, VMware, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Talk America and Informix Software.

Leveraging technologies to achieve business objectives . . .  improving system efficiency and viability to increase profitability . . . and building teams to analyze issues and reach effective solutions . . . are some of the transferable skills that I will bring to any new situation.

My core strengths lie in virtualization, database management systems, performance tuning and scalability, grid computing, ERP, data center development and maintenance, team building, disaster recovery, IT Security, networks, systems programming, life-cycle methodologies, application development.

I am seeking a technology presales or consulting position in a company with financial stability, growth opportunity, the entrepreneurial spirit of a startup and that values their technical sales team and is looking to leverage technology to reach new heights previously unattainable.

I would be happy to discuss my qualifications further and how I will apply my knowledge to your environment.

Sincerely,

Laurence Grant
larrygrant01@gmail.com
267-247-6004

 

Laurence Grant           3786 Amberton Way             Phone 267-247-6004
                                                                                 Doylestown, PA  18901        E-mail larrygrant01@gmail.com

Principal SE  / Principal Consultant

Architect / Swat Team / Specialist

 

Virtualization / IT Security / DBMS  / Data Center / Risk Management
Grid Computing / WEB / J2EE / SOA / E-Commerce / ERP / SAP / Life-Cycle
Application Development / Team Building / Disaster Recovery 

 

Award-winning, results-driven IT executive, providing infrastructure design and development expertise to support software development, networking, security and disaster recovery. Achieved competitive advantage by creating operating efficiencies, increasing productivity and improving bottom line in high-tech environments. Leveraged technology and its management for competitive advantage for $500M+ companies, including Talk America and Informix Software. Recognized as “CTO of The Year” in 2005 from Oracle Corporation and InfoWorld Magazine.

 

·        Achieved Presidents Club first year after returning to a pre-sales SE role.

·        Promoted after only 8 months to National Manager of SE Specialists.

·  Developed real-time data infrastructure using Oracle 10g grid concepts, saving millions in hardware and licensing costs.

·         Reengineered and upgraded CRM system, providing improved customer service and satisfaction.

·         Revamped Talk America systems infrastructure through consolidation and virtualization, reducing costs 70%.

·         Implemented Disaster Recovery site, including A-Sync hot-site failover and active/active scenarios.

·         Developed interactive AOL Long Distance portal, generating over one million new sign-ups.

·         Manage a multi-million dollar IT budget for servers, storage, DR, networking, salary, bonuses and support.

·         Led technology integration during acquisitions and mergers to ensure smooth transition between systems, guarantee data integrity and security and provide backup procedures to minimize risk and maximize resource efficiencies.

·         Built state-of-the-art data center from the ground up, leveraging the latest technologies in virtualization, SAN/ILM, Clustering, Fail-over, High Performance and Scalability.

Special Skills: Leveraging technologies to achieve business objectives. Analyzing issues and building technical teams to reach effective solutions. Improving system efficiency and viability to increase profitability. Ensuring processes and system tools are rapidly adaptable to changing market conditions. Establishing quality control methods and standards.

 

SELECTED ACCOMPLISHMENTS



Achieved Presidents Club first year after returning to a pre-sales SE role.  
In less than 8 months and with a new sales account manager, was able to close multiple multi-million dollar opportunities and exceed quota expectations.  Also received all VMware training and certifications including the 3rd party accredited VCP and ITIL certifications.

Promoted after only 8 months to National Manager of SE Specialists.  Leveraging my management experience I adopted a team of 7 unmanaged specialists and developed it into a team of 13 organized and focused professionals in less than 4 months.  Developed the strategy and plan for the teams’ vision and created tactical initiatives to drive it.

Developed real-time data infrastructure across core systems, saving millions in hardware and licensing costs. Talk America struggled with growth and high availability, difficult synchronization, costly data redundancy and delayed reporting. Leveraged Oracle’s 10g Grid Database to create highly redundant and scalable architecture, allowing real-time reporting and data warehousing and 24x7 batch processing with no negative impact to transactional systems or new hardware costs. Recognized as “CTO of The Year” from both Oracle Corporation and InfoWorld Magazine.

Reengineered and upgraded CRM system, providing improved customer service and satisfaction. Company was experiencing declining customer satisfaction. Identified legacy client-server care system as root cause of unsatisfactory customer service. Utilized J2EE and IBM’s WebSphere to replace existing system. Leveraged SOA, BPEL and Queuing, along with other Java technologies to provide improved scalability, performance and availability. Received #1 Customer Satisfaction award from J.D. Power two years in a row.

Revamped Talk America systems infrastructure through consolidation and virtualization, reducing costs 70%. Entry into new markets meant ramping up infrastructure, requiring significant costs in new hardware, licensing, ongoing support, increased data center space and power. Leveraged latest technologies to replace existing systems with newer, higher performing systems and virtualization, reducing space required and greatly increasing computing power. Enhanced performance, availability and fault-tolerance along with growth and better manageability. 

Implemented Disaster Recovery site, including a-sync hot-site failover and active/active scenarios.  Leveraged the hardware replication features of EMC Symmetrix, including TimeFinder and SRDF to provide various replication strategies across the enterprise.  Further leveraged Oracle’s Dataguard to provide increased replication options.

Developed interactive AOL Long Distance portal, generating over one million new sign-ups. Joint venture between America On-Line and Talk America required compelling WEB presence to provide AOL’s customer base discounted long distance. Developed interactive web portal allowing signups, self service functions and real-time viewing of telephone call history. Site averaged millions of page hits and high transaction volumes per day. 

Manage a multi-million dollar IT budget for servers, storage, DR, networking, salary, bonuses and support.  Nurtured vendor relations to renegotiate contracts saving millions in support costs.  Planned technology upgrades to leverage the best and most cost efficient strategies to move the business forward while balancing budgets and delivering projects on time.

Led technology integration during acquisitions and mergers to ensure smooth transition between systems, guarantee data integrity and security and provide backup procedures to minimize risk and maximize resource efficiencies.  Oversaw the planning, migration and shutdown of two data centers.  Provided a zero down-time migration plan of legacy data into new environment.  Leveraged opportunity for systems and software upgrades to latest technologies.

Built state-of-the-art data center from the ground up, leveraging the latest technologies in virtualization, SAN/ILM, Clustering, Fail-over, High Performance and Scalability.  Leveraged a multitude of storage technologies to provide 5 tiers of storage across the enterprise.  Leveraged virtualization to consolidate over 300 servers down to 40 physical machines saving millions in HW costs.  Designed for optimal cooling and power consumption to provide years of growth. 

CAREER HISTORY

 

Principal Technology Architect/Sales Consultant, Oracle Corporation, $25B Enterprise Software Company, September '08-Present, Oracle is the world’s largest Enterprise Software Company.  As a Technology Architect for Oracle, I am focused on providing the technical leadership for key accounts in the North East.  Oracle separates their technical products into 5 pillars including: Database, Middle-Tier, Security, BI/DW, and E2.0 (Web content/collaboration).  As an architect, I'm responsible for all 5 pillars.  I provide all pre-sales related activities across the pillars including white-board conversations, product presentations and demos, assistance with POC's as well as architectural discussions and planning sessions on how customers can best leverage all 5 pillars within their environments.  As the technical lead I will pull in additional pillar experts as needed to ensure the customer is getting the level of support they require.  I specialize on the database and building highly available and redundant systems.  My experience in Cloud Computing helps customers to better understand how to get more out of their investment, providing concepts around consolidation, automation, streamlining and cost reduction. 

National SE Manager, Solution Specialists, VMware, $1B Subsidiary of EMC, Jan ’08-August '08, VMware is the world’s leading provider of virtualization solutions for x86-based servers and desktops. Through a pioneering approach to virtualization, VMware technology works to separate the software from the underlying hardware.  At VMware I was selected to build-out a new team of technical sales specialists focused on providing enterprise class solutions leveraging virtualization and VMware’s product portfolio.  This technical sales overlay organization is chartered with providing technical sales support through presentations, demonstrations, architecture reviews, white-boarding, mentoring/training, POC/Pilots and other forms of customer engagement.  The Specialists are the go to team for questions on the latest VMware product offerings and providing real-world industry experience around the solutions.  We are also the sales conduit to Product Management, Product Marketing, Product Engineering, Sales Training and other corporate groups.


NY Metro Strategic Accounts, Staff Systems Engineer, VMware, $1B Subsidiary of EMC, May’07-Dec ‘07,  At
VMware, I provide technical leadership and product knowledge to fortune 500 companies in the NY/NJ area.  My time is spent mentoring and coaching VMware customers and enthusiast on how to best leverage the VMware technologies within their organizations.  It is my responsibility to ensure our customers understand our products capabilities and how to best utilize them.  Through a process of education, coaching and mentoring I'm able to provide customers the confidence they need to leverage virtualization throughout their organization and the support they need to ensure their success.

Sr. Director North American IT Infrastructure/Operations, TEVA Pharmaceutical, $8B Global Company, 2007-April’07, Largest generics branded pharmaceuticals manufacturer in the world, headquartered in Israel, TEVA is ranked #15 in the NASDAQ-100.  Head all North American IT Operations including; Oracle Database and Oracle ERP.  When I came to TEVA there was little redundancy and many vulnerabilities in their infrastructure.  I’ve put the wheels in motion to rebuild their entire North American Network, developed and began implementation of an IT Disaster Recovery Plan and began the migration of hundreds of stand-alone servers to a virtual environment offering new options in high-availability and fault-tolerance.  TEVA now has an IT Infrastructure worthy a #15 ranked NASDAQ-100 Company.

VP of IT Operations/VP of Enterprise Computing, Talk America, $500M, 1997-2007, telecommunications company offering telephone and Internet services to over 500,000 residential and business customers across US. Head all technology decisions and oversee all of IT Operations including; Oracle, Informix and SQL Server Systems. Oversee Storage, Security, High-Availability, Performance, DR, UNIX, Linux and Windows Production and Development Servers, Global Messaging and Collaboration, Batch Processing and Server Virtualization. Oversee all IT projects, assuring timely completion while providing optimal balance of existing resources and minimizing duplication. Manage all production applications and integration, including 3rd party applications such as; Oracle Financials, Intec Convergent Billing and CABS, Microsoft CRM, Metasolv TBS and Telution's COMX Billing and CRM.

Principal II, Advanced Technology Group, Informix Software, 1990-1997. The ATG Group was organized to identify and consolidate advanced technical resources to better support Fortune 500 companies in utilizing Informix's newest technologies. Managed technical presentations, round-table discussions, demonstrations, proof of concepts, training, mentoring, installations, performance tuning and benchmarking. Provided senior project management, mentoring, sales support and other technical services. Recognized as Eastern Region’s Leading Performance Specialist and received numerous awards, including “SE of the Region” and “SE of the Year”.

Early Career: Systems Programmer/Analyst, Robec Distributors, involved in the creation of a new operating system for the Intel family of microprocessors; Developer, SGS-Thomson Microelectronics, developed and maintained MRP II manufacturing system on DEC and Data General Systems.


 

 

 

EDUCATION / PROFESSIONAL / PERSONAL

 

Undergraduate: Temple University, Major: BSCS, two years. Arcadia University, Major: BSCS, three years evening school. Currently in discussions with Arcadia to acquire credits for 20 years of working experience towards the obtainment of degree.

Technical Training: VMware VCP Certification, VMware VSP Certification, ITIL Certification, TOP Sales Certification, Informix Database Administration I, Informix Database Administration II, Informix SQL, Informix 4GL, Informix Embedded-SQL for C, Informix Building Web Applications, Informix TimeSeries Datablade, Informix Performance Tuning, Informix XPS (Extended Parallel Server), Oracle Database Administration I, Java Programming (Oracle Consulting), SUN J2EE, IBM WebSphere Administration.

Speeches Given: Oracle Open World December 2004, Computer World Premier 100 IT Leader Conference 2005, Boston SIMPosium 2005, Forbes/Oracle Grid Computing/IT Consolidation Webinar 2005, Gartner Analyst Day Panel 2005, VMWare Roadshow, Philadelphia 2006.

Awards, Honors and Special Recognition - Professional: Oracle Corporation Editors Choice CTO of the year 2005 Award, InfoWorld Magazine Top 25 CTO’s of 2005 Award, TDWI Best Practices Nomination by Oracle Corporation, DM Review: High Availability, Performance & Systems Management Award Nomination by Oracle Corporation, Informix SE of the Year 1995, Informix SE of the Eastern Region 1994.

 

PROFESSIONAL TECHNOLOGIES AND SKILLS



§          Over 20 years working on various database systems including Oracle, Informix, SQL Server and DB2

o         In-depth experience with internal architecture

o         Managing large multi-Terabyte transactional and warehousing systems

o         Heterogeneous processing: Gateways, data replication and synchronization

§          Oracle expert in 10g, RAC, Grid, SOA, Message Queuing (A-Queue), SQL optimization and tuning, and XML

o         Clustering (Multiple active/active and active/standby node topologies)

o         Parallel processing across the cluster and within clusters

o         Grid Control management, monitoring, escalations, reporting

§          Over 5 years working with J2EE systems

o         Websphere, BEA Weblogic, Oracle Application Server, JBoss

§          Storage and SAN expert

o         Architect high-performance systems for optimal database usage

o         ILM, developed 5-tier storage archive solution

§          Fluent in C, C++, Java, PLSQL, Perl, AWK, PHP (any many other programming languages)

o         Batch processing (eliminating contention)

o         Performance optimized

o         Networking Code, Server side and client, TCP and UDP

o         3D Graphics and Game development hobbyist (http://www.3dmuve.com)

§          Performance and Benchmarking specialist

o         SQL Tuning

o         Leveraging SMP/Parallel processing for complex Queries

o         Leveraging Clustering and Load Balancing for Workload Distribution

o         Table functions for greatly enhancing the speed of PLSQL processing

§          Highly trained in SMP and parallel processing systems

o         Designing code to better leverage SMP environments

o         Leveraging systems for optimal application performance

o         Identifying hot-spots and adjusting system parameters to compensate

§          Expert in high-availability and mission critical systems

o         Designing and leveraging load-balancing and clustering

o         Monitoring and reporting

o         Replication with EMC Timefinder and Dataguard

§          Expert in disaster recovery and fault-tolerance

o         Replication with SRDF and Dataguard

o         Host replication and synchronization / Automatic and manual fail-over strategies

o         Network bandwidth analysis, security and data protection

§          Expert in network topologies

o         LAN, WAN, Routing, Wireless

o         Identifying inefficiencies and developing solutions

o         Minimizing vulnerabilities and single points of failure

§          Expert in Security and Data Integrity

o         Database and Network encryption

o         Intrusion detection

o         Firewalls, DMZ, VPN

§          Expert in VMWare and Server Virtualization

o         Consolidation to fewer servers

o         Imaging for faster turn-around of new systems

o         Optimal resource management, no wasted idle resources

o         More efficient administration

o         Automated failover of downed systems

o         Automated load-balancing of resources preventing hot spots

§          Strong communicator at all management levels, well spoken and able to articulate technology to everyone

o         Meeting leader and organizer

o         Presenter, having been in-front of hundreds of people

o         Technical, overseer and mediator, round-table and brain storming sessions

§          Strong business sense

o         Able to understand priorities and schedules

o         Working with business owners

o         Listening and understanding pains

o         Providing solutions

o         Setting expectations

§          Expert in understanding how different technologies work best together

o         Hardware, storage, software, networking, security, memory management

o         Building best-practices

o         Foreseeing problems before they arise

o         Architecting sound technology solutions

 

References available upon request