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Hongheng LauM.S., B.S., VP, IT Infrastructure & Operations 

I help company grow and succeed by cultivating talent, fostering collaboration, inspiring innovation, optimizing costs, and delivering service excellence"

Austin, TX 78732

+1 (408) 409-3191

  • LinkedIn

Executive Summary

Transformative IT leader with a proven track record in spearheading teams across the US, Europe, and Asia, delivering high-impact results and enabling organic and M&A growth at Startup stage, PE investment to IPO exit. Results-driven Infrastructure & Operations executive with successes in leveraging diverse global leadership experience and utilizing adaptable business and technical acumen to drive strategic implementation that deliver excellencies in gross margin, enhances processes, boosts customer satisfaction, streamlines service delivery, improves efficiency, and optimizes cost. Renowned positive and inclusive leader known for cultivating and retaining rock-star teams, fostering cross functional collaboration, and cultivating a 'can-do' culture that inspires the teams to deliver scalable and sustainable technology solutions that fuel organizational success.

Career Highlights:

  • Exceptional Growth and Efficiency: Enabled almost 10-fold growth in just 6 years, achieving a >75% SaaS gross margin, and consistently delivering on 100% SLA commitments.

  • Streamlined Operations and Expansion: Reduced $8 million annual cost, successfully integrated 9 mergers and acquisitions, consolidated 12 data centers, restructured the global organization, and maintained an impressive 95% global retention rate.

  • Scalability and Budget Optimization: Transformed infrastructure to support a 400% increase in scalability over a 6-year period while optimizing incremental budget expenses to stay below 200%.

  • Competitive Edge and Cost Savings: Strengthened price competitiveness and alleviated cost pressures by achieving a remarkable $127 million ROI on a $6.1 million TCO database contract through strategic infrastructure architecture.

  • Accelerated SaaS Revenue Recognition: Significantly enhanced SaaS revenue recognition, reducing the cycle from 6 months to just 2 weeks through process improvements and automation.

Areas of Expertise

  • Service Delivery & SLA Design

  • IT Process Improvement & Governance

  • ITIL Service Management Framework

  • Virtualization & Micro-Segmentation

  • Cybersecurity & Compliance

  • Infrastructure Architecture & Scalability

  • M&A Integration Planning & Execution

  • IT Project Management & Execution

  • Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

  • Datacenter, Systems, Network, Database

  • SaaS GM / Budget Management

  • CAPEX/OPEX Costs Optimization

  • Team Development & Retention

  • IT Strategy and Technology Roadmaps

  • Contract and Vendor Management

Experience

IT Infrastructure & Operation Consultant

Self-Employed

2022 - Present

  • Created CircinoNow Platform: a platform connecting industry veterans with young professionals to shape the industries.

  • Self-improvement and continue learning. Completed certification on Foundations of Leadership Success.

  • Advised the Malaysian State government leadership on designing SLAs and Business Continuity Plan.

  • Served as mentor for startup accelerator program to provide insight and guidance to founders.

VP, IT Infrastructure & Operation 

E2open LLC

2015 - 2021

  • Led global IT Infrastructure & Operations consisting of 7 functional teams, overseeing on-prem data center, network, servers, storage, and databases. Supported ~10x growth from a PE investment to a $2.57B NYSE IPO in 6 years.

  • Attained >75% gross margin on $20M budget ($500M+ SaaS revenue). Partnered with the Executive team, finance, and stakeholders, optimized CAPEX & OPEX spend, addressed tech debt, and aligned costs with gross margin and EBITDA goals.

  • Delivered 100% Service Level Agreement (SLA) commits to global customers. Implemented high-availability infrastructure, enhanced stability and scalability, improved processes, policy, governance, operations efficiencies, and fortified security.

  • Achieved $8M cost reductions through renegotiating multi-year hosting contracts and successfully managing projects that consolidated 9 M&As and 12 data centers, all completed on time, under budget, and with zero service interruptions.

  • Rearchitected virtualized DB infrastructure and realized $127M ROI on a $6.1M contract over three years, delivering over 4.5x the initial projected ROI. Also eliminated database COGS by certifying licenses sufficient for 900% growth.

  • Transformed infrastructure with latest virtualization technology which enabled rapid scalability of infrastructure by 400% to facilitate multi-factor growth, over 6-year span, while optimized incremental budget to below 200%.

  • Integrated multiple M&As, restructured and scaled into a single global organization, coached, and developed 6 high-performing directors and managers in US, Europe, and Asia, while maintaining 95% global staff retention over 6-year span.

  • Eliminated risk on SOC 2, ISO27001 audit and GDPR compliance. Partnered with CISO & Infosec, collaborated across multiple M&As, standardized security policy, data protection and privacy, best practices, SOP, IT governance, and ITIL framework.

  • Fortified security and data privacy on global SaaS offerings by implementing various security measures such as MFA, IDS/IPS, DDoS protection, OS hardening, perimeter & endpoint security, layered network, and micro-segmentation (SDN technology).

  • Optimized IT resilience and designed disaster recovery architecture that achieved 5-minute RTO/RPO, exceeded 15-minute SLA commit, by identifying vulnerabilities in critical assets, architecting 99.99% HA, streamlining operational processes.

Senior Director, IT Operation 

E2open LLC

2010 - 2015

  • Led 4 functional teams in the US, Europe, and Asia, supporting growth from startup stage to NASDAQ IPO.

  • Delivered 78% gross margin, 100% SLA commits, reduced COGS and improved gross margin via virtualization and architect change that minimized license cost.

  • Accelerated SaaS revenue recognition from 6 months to 2 weeks. Eliminated revenue recognition risk by revamping post-sale revenue recognition process with external auditors, Finance, Contract, Sales, Professional Service and Global Support.

  • Enabled business expansion into China, built datacenter in 6 months with remote resources, and achieved 52% SaaS gross margin on the new datacenter investment in its first year by revamping IT architecture and optimizing infrastructure cost.

Director, IT Operation 

E2open LLC

2010 - 2015

  • Eliminated SLA risk and service credit payouts by leading cross-departmental initiatives that reduced 300% false positive production alerts and resulted in SLA compliance on 15-minute incident response time on SEV 1 / P1 incidents.

  • Streamlined $2.6M annual CAPEX & OPEX by implementing server virtualization, reducing infrastructure costs by 47% and operational costs by 57% per customer solution.

VP of IT / VP, Director, Software Development, Galaxy Distribution System Ltd (Ground Services Travel Portal)

Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer, Pivota.com (Architected and built eCommerce Platform. Partnered with Oracle, Sun, DHL, and Banks)

Database Architect & Project Manager, Infusis.com (Consulting Services)

Education & Certifications

Executive Program in International Management, Stanford Graduate School of Business / University of Singapore

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Master of Science in Computer Science (World Wide Web & Database), University of Missouri-Columbia

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Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (Minor in Mathematics), University of Missouri-Columbia

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Foundations for Leadership & Success, Leap Academy

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ITIL Certifications, ITIL Foundation

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Dale Carnegie Effective Communications and Human Relations, Dale Carnegie

Volunteer & Organizations

Admin & Mentor, CircinoNow Platform (Mentoring young professionals to make a positive impact)

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Executive Member, International LEAP Network (private exclusive network for executive leaders and entrepreneurs)

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Mentor to Startup Founders, Newchip Accelerator (Global startup accelerator led by entrepreneurs and investors)

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Teaching Assistant, Austin Kids Can (Non-Profit helping underprivileged children escape poverty via IT education)

Global Experience & Languages

Global Leadership: US, UK, Germany, India, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand

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Languages: English, Mandarin (Chinese), Cantonese, Malay

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