​​​​Gus Tepper​

Slalom Consulting, LLC – Manhattan Beach, CA

February 2011 to June 2015

 

An international consulting firm operating in 17 markets.  Focused on growing Southern California market in technology and business consulting, responsible for service delivery and strategy at the local level.

 

Managing Director, Southern California

Responsible for the service delivery of technical consulting and expansion of practices to meet strategic and market needs for this nationally recognized consultancy.   Established strategy and technical direction for all technical practice areas.  Established alliance relationships and built business on personal network from 30 to 130 people in 4 years.  Provided corporate insight and feedback for firm strategy.

 

Accomplishments: 

• Grew practice from 30 to 130 individuals in a 4 year period responsibly (i.e. profitably) for a US only delivery based model.

• Firm Partner and responsible executive on various engagements ranging from $500k to $10M in size, with maintaining gross profit margin between 45 and 55%.

• Responsible executive for technical delivery of the following practices:

  • Software Engineering (Cloud based solutions in Java, .NET, Mobile IOS and Android development deployment in Native Apps, AWS and Azure)

  • Customer Relationship Management (Salesforce and Dynamics CRM)

  • Portals and Collaboration (SharePoint, Sitecore, Episerver)

  • Information Management and Analytics (Tableau,  Business Objects)

  • UX (user experience design- successfully merged marketing agency principles with internal software engineering practice for full service engineering and design.

• Managed and set direction for all technical practice leads in Southern California

• Signature authority and review of all outgoing client contracts in Southern California

• Established and maintained the following alliance relationships: Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Sitecore, EpiServer,Salesforce.com, Tableau

• Risk Management and Accountable executive program development and deployment in the local market to all leaders.

• Led High Performance Team sessions for managers.

 

Mercury Insurance, Brea, California 

September 2007 to January 2011     

 

A Fortune 1000 property and casuality insurance carrier operating in 13 states focusing on strategic systems growth, geographic expansion and increasing the top-line revenue.

 

Vice President, Enterprise Applications

Manages the direction for a 400 person organization and $45 Million budget applied to both domestic and foreign resource pools.   Responsible for the software development of enterprise applications for this fortune 1000 insurance provider.   Sets direction for architecture, analysis, design, development, quality assurance, user experience and business intelligence  departments to meet the objectives of various strategic initiatives and maintenance activities.   Responsible for a global workforce of FTEs and contractors with operations in Brea, CA and Oklahoma City, OK, and service partners in India.

      .

Accomplishments: 

• Successfully delivered a high volume/large transaction point of sale system supporting approximately 5,000 independent agencies (approximately 30,000 users) for quote/application submission of personal and commercial casualty lines policies

• Enhanced and maintained internally developed policy, claims and billing systems supporting 4000 internal users in underwriting, claims, billing and a national helpdesk.

• Delivered various customer astonishment initiatives including a new consumer website and national call center improvements.

• Established, developed  and deployed enterprise business intelligence/data warehouse solutions

• Integrated point of sale solutions to approximately 30 third party multi-rater data providers via web-services implementation with our underwriting systems

• Deployed  large, multi--clustered environments, employing fault tolerant architectures.

• Transformed the workforce to a matrix organization increasing implementation throughput two fold.

• Successfully implemented Agile methodology focusing on high value, frequent development of high-priority items,

• Implemented test driven development (TDD) and continuous test integration for larger initiatives via Fit/Fixtures

• Introduced and implemented UX design techniques. 

• Deployed  large, multi--clustered environments, employing fault tolerant architectures.

 

First American Corporation, Santa Ana, California 

Oct 2002 to Sep 2007   

 

A fortune 500 title insurance and data provider.  

 

Vice President, Software Development and Network Operations

Responsible for the Architecture, Engineering (Construction), Database Development, Build Engineering, Production Support, Site Support Engineering, LAN Administration, Desktop Support, Account administration and Helpdesk of the Enterprise Technology Group, whose main focus was the creation of a POS bundled order system for company’s many businesses.      Set the direction for a 170 person organization with approximately a $12 Million labor budget, and $8 Million hardware/software budget.   Brought in to develop a wholly owned software development subsidiary in Bangalore, India consisting of 15 software developers, and grew the subsidiary to approximately 130 individuals, saving approximately $8 Million in labor costs.   Managed and oversaw operations in Poway, CA, Santa Ana, CA and Bangalore, India.

   

Accomplishments:

• Successfully developed and delivered First American’s bundle order transaction system.  The system integrates to various First American companies, and allows consolidated ordering and invoicing.   The system is a high volume transaction system, handling approximately 25,000 orders per day with large payload (typically up to 10 mb+).  The platform is used by large US lenders. 

• Applications are implemented as both system-to-system integrations utilizing XML and web-services, and are also available utilizing a BEA Portal implementation.  

• The primary bundle-ordering platform, FAWS (First American Web Services), utilizes a highly redundant 17 server implementation. 

• Developed and implemented ORS, the routing engine utilizes a .NET architecture

• FAWS was implemented in J2EE utilizing BEA Weblogic application servers, Apache web servers, and Oracle databases on Sun/Solaris platforms.   The .NET implementation utilizes IIS web-servers, .NET Application servers and both Oracle and Microsoft SQL-Server databases. 

• Implemented the system for high availability utilizing Veritas Global Cluster Management for real-time failover to an offsite disaster recovery site.   System monitoring is performed with Veritas i3.   Database entries are replicated using Shareplex.  

 

BDO Seidman (Wavebend)/Experio Solutions (now Hitachi Consulting)  Sep 1996 to Oct 2002

 

A middle-market accounting firm’s privately held, national consulting practice that was sold to Hitachi in 2001.

 

Director/ Practice lead of IT Consulting

Opened the information technology consulting practice in the Costa Mesa, CA office of BDO Seidman.    Responsible for practice development, including business development, employee recruitment/development, and project delivery for the firm.   Responsible for approximately 15 large engagements over a 5 year period, including IT Strategy, application development and deployment of systems.   Engagements varied between 3-4 months to 2+ years.   Larger engagements included Sony Pictures Entertainment, Insight Health Services, Global Financial Press, Russ Reid Corporation, Amgen, US Search, Firstlook, First American and various other clients.     Interim practice leader of the Information Technology practice in the Manhattan office of our New York firm, while searching for a local practice leader in the tri-state area.

 

Accomplishments:

• Successful development and delivery of various client facing internet applications (e.g. US Search, Firstlook)

• Successful development and delivery of client/server applications focusing on internal back office operations.  (e.g. Insight Health, Russ Reid, Global Financial Press)   

• Responsible for the delivery of new technologies for semantic meaning utilizing ontologies and taxonomies that were patented by US Search

• Responsible for numerous engagements covering strategy, software methodology, best practices, and organizational evaluation and transformation. (e.g. AMGEN, SPE)

• Interim practice manager of BDO Seidman’s New York City Consulting practice in Manhattan, NY, 1997.  Turned the practice around, selling a few large engagements and putting a number of failing engagements back on track with the successful delivery and completion of these engagements.