London Docklands - the avantgarde of international banksThese days, I mainly work for large Wallstreet firms designing Cyber Security solutions and desigining business processes around operating large enteprise networks. I spending much time in London and New York. Financials have special requirements. Many of my customers' networks are very large, larger than the telco networks of some countries. There are special requirements around the financial business which is ultra low latency, handling capability of high volume of small packets containing financial transactions, combined with a fast moving environment with the necessity for utmost reliability and security. And you all need to manage that - cost effectively. I design such networks and also manage the implementation, which often involves managing a large crowd of very diverse contributors from multiple vendors.

In my last role, I was founding and running a strategic initiative to increase Junos adoption in the enterprise. Junos is the flagship product of my company, deployed by most phone companies in the world and used virtually by everybody when browsing the Internet. I joined the company through an acquisition and our contribution was the ScreenOS line of security appliances. Our security products are well known in the enterprise for their reliability, ease of management, and high ASIC performance. However, traction which the telco product line in the enterprise was initially slow. Many years back, I successfully launched a major competitive upgrade program which brought our security products on the map. And now I saw the time to figure out a solution on how to get the enterprise world to accept Junos, which became very strategic for the company as we entered the business with a new line of datacenter products. I developed a business plan, pitched it to our executive leadership, and received funding. We developed an entire strategy which involved identifying gaps such as partner support, service needs, customer training gaps, technical marketing needs and such. Our focus was on finding effective ways on how to make it easier for our enterprise customers to deploy and use our products with the goal to boost revenue in this sector. For that purpose, I founded a new global consulting team with a cost effective focus on directly helping our partners and customers to migrate to Junos and deploy our products.

I came to the Silicon Valley in 1998 to study how Startups work and tick. I established myself as a business and technology consultant. Driven by the aftermath of 9/11 and the ever expanding Internet, I landed in Cyber Security. But my interests are more shifting into entrepreneurial / intrapreneurial things. During my practice, I was observing too many organizational gaps which cost clients lots of money and slow things down while increasing exposure. I learned how not to run a business. Often I get pulled in as the architect and ended up consulting to executives providing insight on how to build effective operations teams . As a consultant, you are getting paid handsomely but you rarely ever get credit which by virtue goes to the people who pay you. I almost might claim that I made more people executives than some business schools.

Here is what I want to do next: I want to return to a startup culture, perhaps even helping to found a Startup. I would like to build a business from scratch or drive an existing one to success. I believe that I learned the trade and do understand the mechanics and success factors. I am driven by thrill, adrenalin, and success. And I am not scarred of long work hours - as long as their is a strong correlation between performance and rewards.

Zurich - home of the banking secretI am interested in solutions around network management and monitoring, but on a wider scale in network oriented technologies such as cloud based services, social networks, and mobility apps. Joining as a partner or as head of Product Management, Marketing, Bizdev, or as CTO.

As a German-American, I understand the culture of both continents and I truly enjoy transferring value custom-molded into each environment. Since many years, I am spending much time in the air but mostly enjoy the contrast between America and Europe, Germany in particular.