Yacov Kogan

Promoted to lead all Global Customer Facing Operations to define, develop, scale, and lead Field Engineering, Technical Account Management and Follow-The-Sun Customer Support (US, UK, India, Mexico, Brazil and Israel).  Oversee global proof-of concept, FOA (first office application), and full-scale deployment for all potential customers.  Responsible for “End-to-End” Vasona Appliance and Virtual Solutions worldwide.  Strategic planning/execution of Trials and FOAs – wide pre-sales engagement responsibilities.  Mentor and couch reporting Managers to improve organizational leadership, seek initiatives, maintain high level of motivation and drive the organization to greater achievements.  Develop Customer relationships to ensure customer satisfaction, retention and up-sales.  Extensive work with Engineering and Product teams -- release planning and implementation.  Primary focal point for all escalations, including both internal and external interface.  Owner of deployment and support strategic planning and risk management.  Successfully implemented Support processes optimization by improving management, cases flow, knowledge base and training which led to 50% improvement in case handling duration  Define, Measure and Maintain Support and Delivery SLAs and KPIs.

Selected to lead the Americas Field Engineering and Customer Support Organization. The main Goal was to manage lab and field trials, deployments and support in US and Latin America potential and existing customers.  Improved top vendor score from 3.0/5 to 4.7/5 by Tier-1 mobile operator via building a customer reporting and communication processes, improved deployment and delivery times and constant customer feedback.  Created and implemented analytics and monitoring tools with Engineering and Product Management to Improve product quality and stability by 30%.  Project planning and execution, including creation and approval of project plans, leading and guiding program managers, working with both C and V level corporate executives.  Lead post event analysis (Root Cause Analysis) and corrective actions implementation by conducting LL (Lesson Learned) sessions with product support leads.  Managed complex programs and interfaces involving hardware vendors, 3rd party contractors, customer engineering and management teams.  Awarded “Key Company Contributor”.

Chosen to build, scale-up and lead the LATAM Field Engineering Team to conduct first company’s large scale FOA engagements and country wide deployments.  Managed company first large-scale product deployment and other global network installations, which led to first multi-million dollar deals and business development in other Telecom operators in the region  Defined, managed and conducted Labs, POCs, FOAs and other business supporting activities.  Built and grew first field Engineering and Support Team in the Company.  Defined procedures and created processes for product deployment from scratch.  Created training programs and material for Field Engineers and Project/Program managers.  Deep technical planning, analysis, crisis management -- tactical and strategic planning.  Successfully managed relationships with customer technical teams.

Hired to oversee and perform company’s first product deliveries, release management and customer demonstrations.  Key contributor in early stage start-up phase -- from first lines of code in agile environment.  Selected and defined tools and procedures from early inception.  Created product delivery frameworks, labs, first demos and customer visits.  Participated in product planning meetings, providing input for initial product design.  Trained and guided first operations engineers and PMs.

 Introduced first Automation framework and tests to large business unit (SRS, project planning)  Managed 4 developers remotely and 3 QA engineers locally

 All SMSC products Manual and Automated Quality Assurance tasks