Mark Lawrence

AWS Solutions Architect

Working for the global leader in AWS distribution, I am a senior consultant to UK partners. I assist and enable partners with generating technical solutions, estimates and approaches for them to deliver to their customers.

• Deliver demonstrations of the AWS platform and the cloud management platform CloudCheckr, to show the benefits of using AWS and how to control costs, ensure security, optimise resources and enable services.

• Help partners define a high-level solution architecture for their customers.

• Demonstrate thought leadership in partner & customer engagements.

• Deliver webinars to educate partners on AWS services.

• Help partners build service offerings to enhance their go to market strategy.

• Support the sales team in driving AWS programs such as MAP and OLA.

Career Break / Go Cloud Architects

Currently following this broad program to develop my cloud architecture skills further and get more cloud architecting experience.

Career Break / Optima IT - AWS Academy

On this training program I attended live training courses on Architecting on AWS, Advanced Architecting on AWS and Security Engineering on AWS, as well as attending evening training sessions every week. Also, a mentor to new students undertaking the same AWS journey with the Academy.

Learnt to design secure and robust solutions following architectural best practices using AWS and gained hundreds of hours of hands-on experience using AWS through 150+ labs in Qwiklabs, (record can be provided) and using my own AWS accounts.

Senior Manager - Global Product Support

Led a global team of 18 engineers spread across UK, USA, Spain, Germany, Mexico and India to deliver 24x7 enterprise support and professional service solutions for Ciena’s optical transport/switching and carrier ethernet products.

• Established team objectives, driving an improvement of 20% on departmental KPIs and SLAs.

• Worked in an agile environment delivering multi-million dollar programmes with aggressive timelines and limited resources.

• Created detailed project plans, with resource planning, risk analysis and cost controls.

• Mentored and developed each member of my team to perform at their best. In 2019 four members of my team were awarded the “Living the Ciena Values’ award that recognises the five key values: Customer First, Integrity, Velocity, Innovation & Outstanding people.

• Managed highly escalated product support incidents impacting Ciena’s customers, providing executive-level communication updates to all stakeholders throughout the entire process.

• Managed, reviewed and developed the performance of a service partner based in India.

Manager - Product Support, EMEA

Led a team of 10 engineers based across Europe that delivered support to over 60 premium customers across EMEA, ensuring that SLAs were met. Served as the first point of contact to assess and manage escalations for customers, internal teams, and senior leaders.

• Improved Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) by 12% for product support in my region by ensuring that my team became customer obsessed and built stronger relationships with customers to gain a better understanding of their challenges and issues.

• Accomplished excellent customer service by monitoring team’s performance on case resolution, identifying performance outliers, and devising and implementing changes that led to improvement.

• Created and developed a user manual for the Customer Success Managers to provide an understanding of technical concepts and the processes and procedures used within GPS to deliver world-class product support services to customers.

• Travelled to India to set up and mentor a new helpdesk team.

Consultant, Product Support

Delivered support on all of Ciena’s products across EMEA to ensure minimum downtime for premium customers, including BT, Cable & Wireless (Vodafone) and Global Crossing (Lumen Technologies). Diagnosing, reproducing and fixing customer software and hardware issues.

• Acted as the Lead Engineer for EMEA’s biggest customer BT. Fulfilling the role of resident engineer when required.

• Gained extensive experience with problem solving highly sophisticated and business-critical products, including Sentry, CoreStream, CN4200 and the Linux based ON-Center network and services management suite.

• Deep level of knowledge and experience working with SDH, SONET, DWDM, OTN and Carrier Ethernet enterprise equipment and associated fiber optic facilities.

• Wrote, reviewed, validated and published required Method of Procedure (MOP)/Internal Service Bulletin (ISB) / Field Service Bulletin (FSB) documents.

• Provided training to customers and mentored and trained new employees.

• Delivered technical presentations on network performance and service level agreement adherence at monthly customer business review meetings.

Specialist, Product Support

Product Support Engineer

IT Systems Engineer

De Montfort University