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John Birch is one of the two founders of FogLifter® Software, LLC and serves as CIO. In this capacity, he leads a fantastic team, focused on software development, product development, and sales go-to-market. He is the Executive Sponsor for FogLifter® relationships with Kaiser Permanente, HCL, ExxonMobil, and Disney.
FogLifter® was born through nearly thirty years of working with service providers and the customers who hired them. John started his career in a variety of engineering positions, finding himself as Managing Director of major accounts at Novus Consulting Group, when it was sold to IBM in 2007. Inside IBM, he ran Storage Services Sales for North America, and then left IBM to start an IBM channel delivery organization for Glasshouse Technologies. At Glasshouse, he grew a sales and delivery organization in the US and EMEA. In 2014, he became a partner in Xceed Group, a UK company, and became CEO of FIMS, which was the US subsidiary of Xceed. During his time at FIMS, John grew the organization from zero to $10M in 2 years. The organization grew to include 12 outsource contracts and approximately 125 staff.
While at Xceed, John tried an experiment: to get engineers to train military vets for careers in IT. This worked incredibly well, and in the process, he discovered the amazing cross-pollination that occurred between vets and IT engineering. Seeing this success, John left Xceed and partnered with Steve O’Keefe to found VSO.
While VSO was a services company, the requests of customers such as Disney, SAP, Kaiser Permanente, and Kyndryl were for automation solutions to the labor-intensive process of aggregating large volumes of IT, financial, and asset information to deliver actionable outcomes. The experience of working with each of these customers to design the solutions they were looking for led to the realization that there is often a dysfunctional relationship between IT support and the parts of the organization that depend on that IT. Solving that dysfunction required specificity vs perception, facts vs opinions, and data-driven discussions.