#43 Surviving, Adapting & Thriving in Times of Great Change

ABOUT THE GUEST: ZAFER KARACA, VP at IBM 

Zafer Karaca, currently serves as Vice President of the Cloud and Services business in Enterprise & Commercial segments for IBM US. Mr. Karaca is responsible for a segment serving 100,000 IBM clients in North America, driving ~$1.6B business on an annual basis. Mr. Karaca is also managing New Client Acquisition, Red Hat Synergy and other key Growth Initiatives for Enterprise go to market teams in his current capacity.   

Prior to that, Mr Karaca was leading Red Hat acquisition for IBM US, where he was responsible for assuring success of a $34B acquisition from a go to market perspective. Delivering innovation and transformation to customers in Americas, based on Open Hybrid Multi Cloud technologies leveraging F2F, Digital Sales and Ecosystem Partners for IBM and Red Hat. 

And prior to assuming that  role, Mr. Karaca was the Director of Digital Sales Strategy and Transformation Globally in IBM Digital Business Group. He led the strategy and transformation initiatives for a global digital sales force with over 4,000 employees supporting the entire portfolio of IBM products, offerings, and solutions. He was responsible for driving revenue growth and client expansion via multiple Digital channels.   

Mr. Karaca held several executive and senior managerial positions in North America, Europe, and Middle East & Africa. Led Services, Systems, Software as well as Cloud businesses. Built several new teams and businesses in key strategic growth areas such as IoT or Public Cloud. Led multiple senior sales and business development teams. Built successful client relationships, strategic ecosystem partnerships and digital sales capabilities.   

Mr. Karaca has a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering from Istanbul Technical University in Turkey and a Master of Science degree in Business and Economics from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He currently lives in New York. 

You can find Zafer on LinkedIn here: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/karacazafer/
 

ABOUT THE EPISODE: 
Zafer Karaca has been a part of a lot of growth and a lot of change in his 10-year career at IBM, working his way from Sales Specialist to Vice President in a short period of time.  During that time, IBM was going through enormous changes, and Zafer was able to adapt, innovate, and thrive in this dynamic environment helping the company to excel and rapidly climbing the org chart along the way.  

In this episode, Zafer talks about some of the challenges to sales organizations as they navigate change, and some of the strategies, concepts, and philosophies he has found most effective for helping teams, individuals and companies succeed through periods of transition.