RAPHAEL EDWARDS, PMP

PROFESSIONAL HISTORY

Akamai Technologies Inc., Cambridge MA 2013 - Present

Service Line Director, 2022 - Present

Senior Service Line Manager, 2020 - 2022

Service Line Manager, 2018 - 2020

Principal Technical Project Manager , 2016 - 2017

Senior Technical Project Manager , 2015 - 2016

Technical Project Manager , 2013 – 2015

Responsible for leading the Customer Success team aligned to the Financial Services industry. Focus areas include leading and building a team of Customer Success 18 Consultants and 2 People Leaders, strategic planning, revenue and resource forecasting, and customer advocacy. I directly interface with and influence peer organizations including Sales, Presales, Support, and Professional Services to drive customer success.

Highlights

  • Lead and manage Customer Success Consulting Services for the Financial Services industry including Banking, Wealth Management, Insurance, FinTech, and Payment Card - $70M+ annual professional services revenue.
  • Architected, and currently leading a global services investment program aimed at driving growth and adoption into strategic accounts. Within the two years the program has achieved $2.4M in net monthly recurring revenue.
  • Architected and led the execution of a professional services sales incentive plan to drive strategic product adoption focused on the abuse and fraud landscape. Within 6 months achieved $318K in strategic product growth and $176K in net monthly recurring revenue.
  • Experienced in building and leading cross-functional and globally dispersed teams, markets include North America, LATAM, and APJ. .
  • Created and led a Value Management program (VMO) that centralizes expertise, creates efficiency, and enables the services organization to focus on creating customer value. The program has reduced more than 2,300 hours in field effort in its first 2 years.
  • Created and led a Thought Leadership program, Project Milkshake, focused on enabling contributors to develop core industry expertise to grow revenue, protect against the competition, and build strong customer relationships. This program has created case study material across all lines of business, contributed to marketing collateral, and supported go-to-market planning.
  • Established an oversight committee to recognize additional revenue from accounts that have over-utilized services entitlements. Lead to an additional 210% increase in additional new revenue.
  • Established and led a program for Blameless Post-Mortems within the Global Services organization. The program reaches more than 500 Akamai services and support personnel on a monthly basis and has directly

Related Experience

  • Experience as an individual contributor for the top Fortune 500 companies. Industries of focus have included high-tech, retail, enterprise, and a specialization in automotive/manufacturing.
  • Key contributor in the launch of Akamai’s Internet of Things and Over-The-Air product offering.
  • The product has helped to pave the way for vehicles and Internet of Things to securely and reliably receive updates and transmit message data in a variety of jurisdictions and Internet connectivity conditions.
  • Aided in the architectural design and real-world customer implementation of the Over-The-Air solution to enable over 1 million connected vehicles to receive critical software updates.
  • Re-invented the New Hire onboarding experience by creating a structured curriculum focused on hands-on learning and scenario-based training.
  • The program accelerated the onboarding ROI by 2-4 weeks for over 30 new hires allowing new hires to be productive sooner.
  • Certified Akamai training Instructor. Represented Akamai and conducted customer training at “Akamai University” and customer conference.

Recognition

  • Global Services Pinnacle Award - 2023
  • Akamai Leadership Academy - 2020
  • Akamai Leadership Preparatory School - 2017
  • Akamai Certified Instructor – 2016 - 2018
  • Akamai “Titan” Award Recipient - 2015 o The Akamai Titan award is given each year to the top performing employees across the Global Sales, Services & Marketing organization.

Raybeam Inc., Bedford, MA 2010 - 2013 Project Manager

Responsibilities

  • Led and managed a team of 8 software engineers and analysts in the requirements gathering, solution design, software build, and support of a custom reporting / analytics platform, data warehouse (single source of truth) for a major hospitality chain. Technologies utilized included: Microsoft SQL Server, proprietary ETL framework leveraging SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Reporting front end.
  • Successfully led engineers in the rapid deployment and global launch of MicroStrategy within an aggressive 3 month timeframe from product acquisition to go live, supporting 10 hotel brands, 5,700 participating hotels, and 350 users including eCommerce Managers, Executive Stakeholders, and Business/ Data Analysts.
  • Managed an agile software delivery program that executed weekly production releases for incremental improvement to deliver scaled tangible results. Prior to this program production releases were on a 30-day cycle.

Stranix Co., Boston, MA 2006 - 2010

Senior Consultant

  • Served as a liaison between product/engineering group and business units to ensure projects are properly scoped in system design and implementation in accordance with customer requirements and system capabilities.

Selected Highlights

  • Reviewed request for proposals (RFP), service contracts and statement of works (SOW) to ensure proposed projects- aligned with available resources, capabilities and technology infrastructure
  • Used web analytics tools (Web Trends / Google Analytics) and search engine marketing techniques to track and optimize the company website to reduce bounce rates and increase overall client conversion.
  • Served as Project Manager and System Engineer in the deployment of AT&T web/audio/video collaboration suite supporting on premise and hosted Software as a Service (SaaS) customers ranging from 500 to 70,000+ users distributed globally.

SpiderSplat Consulting, Inc., Boston, MA 2005

Search Engine Optimization Consultant

  • Worked exclusively with Director of Search Marketing to strategize, up sell, and analyze ROI for Pay per Click campaigns.
  • Created competitive analysis reports, analyzing web server log data to project search engine traffic patterns using ethical Search Engine Optimization best practices.

EDUCATION

Management Information Systems | Business Administration – University of Massachusetts – 2001 - 2005

AWARDS AND PROFESSIONAL TRAINING

  • Project Management Professional #1276180 - 2009 – Present
  • Akamai Leadership Preparatory School – 2017 o Selected high-performing individuals engage in an 18-month program focused on developing future leaders.
  • ‘Talk So People Listen’ – Speakeasy Communications Consulting – 2017 o Intensive program designed to develop strong communication style and presentation through video assessment and peer feedback.

PUBLICATIONS