Christopher Cappo
Leader. Entrepreneur.
Business Management | Sales Enablement | SW Development
Christopher Cappo
Business leader within the IBM Intellectual Property Organization.Relentlessly focused on the client experience.I am an experienced upline manager who understands how to build and nurture high-performance teams, across a variety of disciplines. My core Enterprise skills are around employee engagement, business development and operations, sales enablement, software development and cloud technologies. My core Personal skills include: executive decision-making, negotiations, executive presentations, critical business metrics and KPIs, financial analysis, and software development. I approach business challenges with an entrepreneurial mindset - always starting with the client's perspective and expectations as the primary design point.
What I Do
Earned Badges & Credentials
Resume
My simple execution philosophy:
Teams must have an unwavering focus on the client – every task, every project, every desired result – starts with the client’s perspective and their unfiltered expectations. My experience is that teams who fail to start with this clear focus will ultimately struggle, and fail to deliver their desired results. Those that get this right iterate efficiently, fail quickly, and keep the client experience front and center of everything they do.
These are the teams that deliver exceptional results.
My experience and skills:
As a proven leader with global, multi-functional experience in business management/operations, strategy, sales enablement, analytics, employee engagement, cloud application architecture, DevOps, and software development – I operate at scale, delivering critical business results by both leading direct teams and partnering across functional teams and with c-suite executives. I lead and navigate the challenges of business transformation within complex, worldwide systems. I continually demonstrate my commitment to client, partner, employee, and executive relationships. I am the trusted advisor to our senior executives, and am consulted with on all critical sales enablement, operations, and business management decisions.
My background as an operations leader, transformation leader, upline manager, engineer, software developer, and systems architect has helped shape my focus on technology as an enabler. I specialize in building high performance teams and leading them to tackle the toughest challenges – driving business efficiencies, execution excellence and sales growth in complex technical environments.
A few notable accomplishments include:
- Leading a development team as the overall architect as well as hands-on SW developer, to deliver a “born on the cloud” application built as a set of microservices around RESTful API endpoints. This is a business rules BPaaS engine that can accommodate multiple business processes related to progression/approval workflows. The IBM Intellectual Property organization runs a >$600M business of IP deal lifecycle management on this platform.
- Onboarding and integrating the IBM Intellectual Property organization with Salesforce, which is used as the pipeline management and CRM system across the enterprise.
- Building IBM’s Lab Services team from a 500 person organization to 1,500 worldwide employees. Creating and leading a matrix-managed worldwide contracts and operations team. Meeting the goal of having the right skill, in the right place, at the right time, for IBM’s Systems clients.
- Refactoring the IBM System Z hardware yearly development plan, into a real-time agile business process that hierarchically focused the plan into immediate, near term, and distant objectives – with ongoing feedback and continuous SWOT assessment.
Professional Experience
2015 - Present
IBM Intellectual Property
Upline Manager: Global Operations, Sales Enablement and SW DevOps/CIO role for IBM's Intellectual Property team. $600M-$1.5B yearly business. Sales Commission Plan Designer and Facilitator. Designer and lead for Enterprise-ready hybrid-cloud microservice application for managing deals through lifecycle. This team licenses Research assets and IBM Brand assets, as well as cross-portfolio Patents. This role directly supports the General Manager of Intellectual Property.
2009 - 2015
IBM Systems
Upline Manager: Global Operations, Contract execution, Sales pipeline management for Software Development and Lab Services teams. Over 3,500 worldwide employees and a $1B development budget. Directly supported IBM General managers, including IBM's to-be CEO, Arvind Krishna.
2005 - 2009
IBM Microelectronics Engineering Services
Manager: Business Operations. "Startup" within IBM, delivering custom ASICs and cell processors to Microsoft (xBox), Apple (Mac) and United States DOD (flight systems), as well as other demanding clients, worldwide.
2003 - 2005
IBM System Z
Portfolio Development Plan manager. All aspects of headcount and financial planning for $1B System Z (Mainframe) development budget, worldwide.
1988 - 2003
IBM Microelectronics / Supply Chain
Various programming and systems integration roles; Semiconductor, active and passive components reliability modeling algorithms, laboratory analytical services fulfillment systems. USA based manufacturing systems integration with SAP.
Education
Ongoing
IBM Internal Education
Various curricula related to Management, Diversity, Cloud Computing, and Software Development.
2000
Master's, Computer Science
Magna Cum Laude - Marist College
Focus on: Natural Language Processing, Databases, CGI (Raytracing).
1988
Bachelor's, Computer Science
Magna Cum Laude - Marist College
Focus on: Object Oriented Programming, Algorithms, Compilers.