Sunday, September 9, 2012

Who is BizTodd

Who am I, and what is this blog all about?  The easy answer is I am Todd Sussman, and this is a place for me to aggregate articles about hospitality and technology as well as express my thoughts on those topics.  BUT, as we all know, the easy answer is not always (read usually) the right answer.

So, then who is BizTodd?  Way back when, I was a BizTalk developer.  As a matter of fact, my first production deployment was on BTS 2002, shortly after it was released.  At the time, I was living in Israel and working for an HMO called Clalit Health Services.  My boss was a very progressive and forward thinker who embraced .Net, WCF, BizTalk, XML and the early concepts of SOA.  This of course led me down the path of  focusing on the middle tier and integration.  I worked at Clalit for a little over 3.5 years and during that time, we managed to integrate 8 hospitals, 1200+ clinics and hundreds of laboratories.  My daughter was born in December of 2003, and in December 2004, my wife and I decided to make the move back to The United States.  I had met some guys from a company called Neudesic and reached out to them to see if they had a position for a guy like me.  Shortly afterwards, my family and I were off for Phoenix and some new adventures.

Fast forward to March 2005 and I became Neudesic's first employee in Phoenix, as well as the first employee outside the state of California.  Those who have known me for a while, know that I love a good challenge, and helping grow a brand new office was an exciting opportunity.  One of the activities I took part in was as a member of a select group (originally I was 1 of 5) of BizTalk developers that Microsoft promoted as Virtual Technical Specialists.  Part of our charter was to support Microsoft in the field when they had a shortage of Internal BizTalk resources to support pre-sales.  Las Vegas was part of the Phoenix territory and in early 2006, I helped sell BizTalk 2006 to MGM and my new love affair with hospitality and gaming was born.  Phoenix was one of the better performing offices at Neudesic, and I had a new goal to chase, I was going to create a new revenue stream for Neudesic focused almost exclusively on hospitality.

Skipping the boring details, in 6 years, Neudesic has seen a revenue increase every year in the hospitality space.  I was able to pursue and work on projects ranging from CRM and profile management to helping design and build an entire PMS system.  I have worked with hotel chains with 3 star all the way up to the super luxury brands.  I helped manage integrations in the gaming space that no one else has yet to duplicate as well as fully embrace industry standards.

Fast forward once again to September 2012, I decided it was time to leave Neudesic and see what new adventures await me.  I absolutely want to stay focused on the hospitality and gaming and that is the driver behind this blog.  I hope you get as much out of this blog as I will.

No comments:

Post a Comment