Mark Wetherspoon

As the Product Owner for Recovery Services I was responsible for leading the product engineering teams for the development and launch of the Sungard Cloud Recovery (CR) Services suite. This suite of services includes Cloud Recovery – Virtual Servers (CR-VS) and Cloud Recovery – Server Replication (CR-SR).

While at Sungard my responsibilities included:

• Understand key business objectives and strategy of the product
• Work with Product Management to prioritize epics and create user stories / tasks as necessary
• Prioritize the backlog based on market and customer demands
• Provide technical clarity to the business objectives of the product requirements
• Work with feature teams to clarify the requirements of any user stories as needed
• Work with lead customers as necessary to ensure Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is actually a viable product
• Participate in scrum meetings to help remove any internal/external roadblocks
• Lead sprint planning, sprint demos, and other agile development related meetings
• Drive product development and enhancements including market analysis and roadmap development
• Partner with engineering, product management, program management and technical writers to oversee the marketing efforts

As the District Principal Technical Consultant (PTC) I was responsible for leading the technical aspects of the services business in the district. This responsibility spans all phases of a project's lifecycle including architecting solutions, scoping service opportunities, overseeing deliveries, handling technical escalations, and ensuring orderly project closure. Specifically, this position included experience designing, architecting, implementing, and integrating HDS products into customer environments.

Provided presales services scoping support for complex solutions in a designated district.
Provided technical oversight for all professional services engagements and drove high levels of customer satisfaction in the district.

• Articulate the overall solution and subsequent service delivery plan to implement the solution to the customer.

• Managed transition points and hand-offs between delivery consultants engaged in different phases of solution delivery.

• Provided subject matter expertise for HDS product sets.

• Provided mentoring and coaching of delivery consultants engaged in projects.

• Ensured customers and sites are ready for service delivery.

• Managed technical escalations during professional services deliveries.

Specialties: CORE COMPETENCIES: Storage Area Network Design, Testing, Implementation, and Support; Business Impact Analysis; Data Integrity/Recovery; Disaster Recovery Planning; Contingency Planning; Research & Development; Risk Assessment; Cost Benefits Analysis

Responsibilities included providing architectural leadership and direction for the storage and data protection technologies across the organization, partnering across all areas of IT, including infrastructure engineering, application development and infrastructure operations, to deliver high quality storage solutions that comprehensively address the business and operational requirements defined for them. The primary subject matter expert in all aspects of storage and data protection infrastructure including solutions architecture, platform design, project leadership, technology road maps and process optimization.

• Created and maintained the current and “3-Year Plan” reference architectures for the managed storage services environment including cloud storage services, storage array standards, SAN switches, fabric design, virtualization technologies, replication solutions, enterprise backup platform and tools to provision, monitor and manage the storage environment
• Identified opportunities to drive value from the organization's existing and planned storage investment through a combination of technical, operational and organizational initiatives
• Created and maintained the storage services catalog and pricing models as well as managed vendor relationships.
• Established standards, policies and procedures for the Dow Jones storage infrastructure in collaboration with the storage engineering and operations teams
• Improved service and cost efficiency through continuous assessment of technology and operational processes reducing storage costs between 15% - 25% per year
• Mentored and coached members of the storage engineering and operations teams to improve skills within the organization

IT-Team Lead (09/2008 – 08/2010)

Promoted to IT-Team Lead of the Shared Storage Services group with the responsibility of managing the team supporting the SAN, NAS, and EBU (Enterprise Back-up) infrastructure for Dow Jones. The Storage Services infrastructure provides access to centralized file and block based storage as well as backup and recovery services providing multiple tiers of online and offline storage to meet the development, quality assurance and production requirements of all Dow Jones business units.

Storage Architect (01/2003 – 09/2008)

Promoted to Storage Architect with the responsibilities of investigating, creating requirements, evaluating solutions, providing technical recommendations and implementing enterprise wide storage platforms for all business lines at Dow Jones.

Storage and Server Engineer (07/2001 – 01/2003)

Transferred to the newly formed Storage and Server Engineering team post launch of the WSJ.com J2.0 redesign project after being recognized as a key technical resource in the design and implementation of new platforms for support of Dow Jones business lines.

Supervisor/Technical Project Lead (09/1999 – 07/2001)

Recruited to manage the Wall Street Journal Online (WSJ.com) open systems production support team and Technical Project Lead for the WSJ.com J2.0 redesign project. Responsibilities included overseeing efforts to identify and evaluate all critical systems for support, management, reporting, alerting and security issues. Provided Tier 3 production support expertise for the WSJ.com online environment and served as a technical resource as needed to other business lines at Dow Jones