Xceliant - Profile

Ian Smith
CEO, Founder, Xceliant Limited
Birmingham United Kingdom

Current:    CEO at Xceliant Limited

Past:        Sales Director, Northern Europe at Mercator (now IBM)
                Sales Leader, TopEnd, NCR Corporation
                Director of Sales, UK at BEA (now Oracle)
                General Business Manager, USA at Meiko
                Managing Director, UK at Trivision Switzerland AG
                Senior Sales Executive, Manufacturing Automation at Honeywell Bull
                Founder and Director at CSM Plastics Automation

Web URL: www.xceliant.com |  Blog: www.beingguided.com

Experience

30+ years in complex, high-value, high-touch sales in the information technology and manufacturing automation industries.

Ian understands the challenge of bringing new technology and services concepts to market, where the vendor may be unknown and the value proposition so new, it's not immediately or clearly understood by those senior decision-makers, who have both the most need and the real authority to buy,

Ian's experience in IT and manufacturing automation has led him to believe that design is the one thing that cannot be commoditised. From early beginnings as a plastics product designer, Ian has always placed design thinking at the centre of his work in both sales and marketing and more recently in creating simple cloud apps on the Force.com platform.

Ian has led start-up European sales organisations for firms such as BEA (now Oracle), Mercator (now part of IBM WebSphere) and the TopEnd Division of NCR (a middleware business acquired by BEA). Ian understands how to bootstrap a tech start-up and believes that much of the hype surrounding cloud computing, social networking and collaborative IT was first created but lost in the dotcom boom and bust of 2000.

Ian is first and foremost a sales professional: someone who thinks day and night about how to apply next generation IT to measurable gains in sales effectiveness - especially in high-value, high-touch business and consumer environments.