Europe Focus Group
The objective of this group is to define common challenges for technical support organizations in Europe and work together on possible solutions. The group also provides input on reviewing and influencing TSANet’s strategy from an European perspective. Contact Rainer Zielonka at rainer@tsanet.org if you would like to join this group.
Below are the details of the upcoming meetings. Contact Rainer Zielonka if you would like to attend any of these sessions.
Group Members
Rainer Zielonka – Senior Consultant, TSANet EMEA Representative & Chairman of EMEA and India Focus Groups
Rainer is the chairman of the TSANet EMEA and INDIA focus groups, an informal network of tech support executives. He represents TSANet in Europe and India to drive TSANet’s regional business and membership growth. Rainer Zielonka, Senior Technical Consultant, has a long history as leader of technical support organizations with over 35 years of experience in the IT industry. As a former chairman he served on the TSANet Board for over ten years.
” I am thrilled to be part of the TSANet team” said Rainer. “The TSANet organization has a winning strategy, a highly talented team and a unique value proposition”
Jochen Kornalewski – Fujitsu EMEA
Jochen Kornalewski has more than 20 years expert knowledge in various technical support functions. He is located in Germany and is responsible for the Global Technical Support of Fujitsu’s Product Business portfolio ranging from personal computing devices to mission-critical data center systems and solutions. Jochen has over 15 years of leadership experience in managing own technical teams as well nearshore and partner support delivery units.
His hobbies are smart home automation, IoT and outdoor activities like biking and skiing.
Jochen lives with his family closed to Augsburg (Bavaria)
Eva Schooss – Lenovo
Eva Schooss joined Lenovo in 2015, and has since been responsible for HW and SW support delivery for Lenovo’s data center group products in EMEA. Her main focus is to create and maintain an excellent service experience for Lenovo’s DCG customers.
Throughout her career of almost 30 years in the IT industry, she held several professional and management positions in Systems Integration, HW and SW support, Technical Sales and Sales.
Eva is based in Mannheim, Germany.
Daniela Mitova – HPE
Daniela Mitova is a seasoned professional with over 15 years of experience in operations management, account management, and team leadership. Currently serving as the HPE Compute Operations Manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Daniela is responsible for designing strategic initiatives and enabling high-performing teams with diverse technical expertise.
With a track record of success in improving customer satisfaction, increasing efficiency, and implementing innovative solutions, Daniela is passionate about authentic leadership and creating psychological safety within organizations. She is also a dedicated advocate for sustainability, actively promoting sustainable practices in her community.
Daniela holds an MBA degree, which further enhances her strategic acumen and leadership capabilities. Her career journey reflects her commitment to fostering a culture of inclusion, innovation, and compassionate leadership, making a positive impact both professionally and socially.
Jens Ulbricht – IBM
Jens joined IBM in 1998 as Manufacturing Engineer for Storage Products working mainly in Germany, Hungary and USA. He held various positions in respect to IBM Storage like New Products Launch Manager, Manager of Engineering Team and Manager of Client Care across EMEA. As Program Director Technical Remote Support, he is responsible for multiple support teams across EMEA for storage products. Jens is located in Frankfurt, Germany.
“Being part of TSANET Focus Group gives me the opportunity to interact closely with experts from other IT companies and to share my expertise and network.” Jens stated.
Rob Schoon – Software AG
Rob became part of the TSANet EMEA Focus group early 2014. He is quite excited to have the opportunity to be part of that group as it helps him understand common business challenges in the IT/Support industry. Rob has worked before with TSANet, between April 2005 and September 2007. He was Director of the Board of TSANet, representing webMethods at the time. In that role he has worked closely together with many of the people who are now still with TSANet. At Software AG he is active as Director Global Support, responsible for the support delivery and customer satisfaction results for the webMethods, IBO and Big Data Product Suites within the time zone EMEA. Together with a team of professional support managers he develops and leads regional teams in The Netherlands, Germany, Spain, England, Malaysia and Israel. Customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction are two of the main focus points for Rob.
Domenico (Dom) Corniola – Atlassian
Domenico (Dom) Corniola started back in the days as an IT support engineer at IBM and climbed the ladder and became Manager of End User support services for companies like Wipro and Danone. Recently Dom has accepted the new challenge of leading and growing the Premier support team for Jira at Atlassian, based in the Amsterdam office.
Jane Cao – Microsoft
Jane joined Microsoft Netherlands at 2014 as the Global Critical Situation Manager within the Microsoft Support Escalation Management team. Her role is dedicated on helping Microsoft worldwide customers to relieve from the direct pain as fast as possible at some of the most complicated and moment of truth type of incidents.
Jane has years of first hand technical support and incident management experiences, many cases studies and true stories of some of the most classic computer system incidents involves multiple system suppliers, multiple product teams, multiple customer businesses across time zones. Those are the true pleasure Jane enjoy keep working at the front line and in the war rooms, from the starting day and till this day.
Denis Canty – Dell EMC
Denis has been with Dell EMC since 2013 and is responsible for managing global partner alliances. His main responsibility is to enable seamless service operations between Dell EMC and their partners and being responsible for TSANet within Dell EMC is a part of that.
Over a twenty year career Denis has also worked directly within a number of support management roles, leading various data center operations across the EMEA region.
Denis is based in Cork, Ireland.
Robert Binkhorst – Red Hat
Robert Binkhorst is a champion for the customer experience and customer success in the EMEA region as the Director of Customer Experience and Engagement for Red Hat in Europe, Middle East and Africa. He works to ensure customers and partners see increased value to their business through their relationship with Red Hat. His team consists of Technical Support, Customer Success Managers, Technical Account Managers, and highly specialised Customer Adoption roles who are all positioned to guide customers from adoption to deployment and beyond, in order to maximise the value they get from Red Hat technologies throughout their adoption life cycle.
Tony Orr – F5 Networks
Tony Orr is the Director of Global Support Services at F5 Networks. Tony’s team consists of approximately 130 engineering professionals across five countries – UK, Poland, Israel, Singapore and North America. A veteran of the services industry, Tony started his career in 1988 as a Field Service Engineer at Case Communications and, over the last 15 years, has held senior leadership positions in both reseller/SI’s and vendor organisations where he’s been responsible for Project Management, Professional Services, Technical Support Services and Networks Operations Centres across Europe.
Tony is based near London, UK. For further details on Tony’s career history, click here.
Akos Szechy- Atlassian
Akos Szechy has over 25 years of experience in various technical support functions and organizations. He was working for Novell/SuSE in Hungary and later in The Netherlands before moving to Riverbed. Since 2014, until early 2023 he was working at Nutanix where he was heading Worldwide Support for EMEA. He was responsible for the support delivery, the support teams across EMEA and Authorized Support Partners in the region.
Most recently since February 2023, Akos is a Group Manager at Atlassian’s Cloud Growth support team. He is leading teams in Europe, India, and Australia responsible for supporting Atlassian’s products. He always wants to understand the root cause and make sure issues are fixed – keeping customer and employee satisfaction as a top priority.
Akos lives close to Rotterdam with his wife, three kids, and their blond Labrador and British Shorthair cat. He is a real planner and his motto is “Plans are nothing, planning is everything.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower”
Arnaud Errede – Amazon
Arnaud Errede has 20 years of expertise in services and customer success leadership working for companies like EMC, Atlassian and now AWS. After growing the EMEA Enterprise Support for Atlassian, introducing new support offerings such as Premier Support and Priority and leading operations, strategy and innovation across the Global Customer Support organisation.
He is now the AWS Benelux Enterprise Support Leader that help unleash the potential of the Cloud for the largest AWS customers via a Team of passionate Cloud enthusiast Technical Account Managers.
Being part of the TSANet Focus group is a unique opportunity to share and exchange best practices with industry leaders and help create a cohesive understanding of industry trends and opportunities.
India Focus Group
The objective of this group is to define common challenges for technical support organizations in India and work together on possible solutions. The group also provides input on reviewing and influencing TSANet’s strategy from an Indian perspective. Contact Rainer Zielonka at rainer@tsanet.org if you would like to join this group.
Below are the details of the upcoming meetings. Contact Rainer Zielonka if you would like to attend any of these sessions.
Group Members
Rainer Zielonka – Senior Consultant, TSANet EMEA Representative & Chairman of EMEA and India Focus Groups
Rainer is the chairman of the TSANet EMEA and INDIA focus groups, an informal network of tech support executives. He represents TSANet in Europe and India to drive TSANet’s regional business and membership growth. Rainer Zielonka, Senior Technical Consultant, has a long history as leader of technical support organizations with over 35 years of experience in the IT industry. As a former chairman he served on the TSANet Board for over ten years.
” I am thrilled to be part of the TSANet team” said Rainer. “The TSANet organization has a winning strategy, a highly talented team and a unique value proposition”
Amid Ganguly – Cisco
Amit joined Cisco as a Leader, Customer Delivery in 2019 with the Data Centre team, managing the overall business operations for the Unified Computing System (UCS) team. He has over 20 years of experience in Performance Management, Operations, customer relationships and service delivery. Before joining Cisco, he worked as an Operations Manager with Convergys India Services Limited, a Global Delivery Partner for Microsoft Enterprise Platform Support, and a Service Delivery Manager with Microland Limited, an IT Infrastructure management services company. Amit began representing NetApp in the TSANet India focus group in 2019 and enjoys contributing to the progress of the group and learning from the shared challenges.
Prashant Chaudhri – Red Hat
Prashant Chaudhri has 15 years of multi-functional experience in the IT industry with core competence in Enterprise Customer Support and Services. He is currently leading the Partner Engagement Strategies as Sr. Partner Success Manager – APAC, at Red Hat. As part of his profile, he is driving the efforts to achieve the desired synergy with strategic partners. Prashant has been with Red Hat for 4 years and prior to this has worked in Enterprise Technical Support & Customer Experience. Prashant’s core competencies include delivering high levels of partner satisfaction while achieving technological excellence, and other operational commitments as well as the ability to drive cross-functional collaboration and leadership.
Prior to Red Hat, Prashant has worked in key positions in Atlas Copco, Allscrtips & Optimos Cop. He thrives in a collaborative and innovative approach, enjoys challenges. He is based in Pune – India
On the personal front, Prashant is happily married to Shikkha Chaudhri, working as a finance leader in a well-known organization. They have a girl named Samara.
Shoumik Kumar – Red Hat
Shoumik Kumar is a Senior Manager , Technical Support with Red Hat and had worked with various product and services organizations before joining Red Hat in 2016. In his current role Shoumik is leading teams of highly technical engineers, seasoned people managers and project managers contributing to various technologies and business initiatives. Shoumik is passionate about technology and his core competencies are around Platforms, Operating systems and Storage. Shoumik strongly believes and practices : “The best place to invest your time is your team.”
In addition Shoumik enjoys listening to music and is always available for a tip or two on fitness!
Antony Fernando – VMware
Antony Fernando is a Principal Escalation Manager at VMware, responsible for managing critical customer escalations at VMware. He has 18+ years of industry experience. He is the SPOC for India Big Bet accounts at VMware and is known for his proactive engagement in driving partnership within the organization (Engineering, Support and Field teams). He has been instrumental in creating awareness about TSANet for multi-vendor collaboration within the organization and being tech savvy, he clearly understands the challenges involved in addressing issues warranting multi-vendor engagement and appreciates the value TSANet brings to the table in such scenarios.
Abhinav Bhargava – Nutanix
Abhinav Bhargava is a Director at Worldwide Support, Nutanix. He has around 18 years of experience in Data Center technologies spanning various support functions and organizations. He started his technical support journey more than a decade ago with Cisco as a support engineer and grew into management. Abhinav joined Nutanix in 2015 and has helped build the team in India along with scaling out the support process and model worldwide. In his current role is responsible for support delivery and support teams in India, along with escalation management and other strategic task.
Customer and his team are his passion and always before anything else, getting to the root and resolving issues end to end are his passion.
He lives in Bangalore with his family and like spending time with his son, music, traveling and books when not solving customer issues. A quote from Einstein is what he believes in – Logic will get you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere!!!
Venkat Raghavan – Citrix Systems
Venkat is a Senior Manager at Citrix. He leads the technical support teams overseeing business operations for EMEA region. Venkat has a team of 50 technical specialists lead by 5 managers, handling global customers for Citrix Virtualization products.
Pavan Kumar V Vemu – IBM
Pavan Kumar V Vemu is a Program Director for Remote Tech Support team in India, and is responsible for Support teams working from India for IBM Enterprise Systems. He has around 24 years of experience in IT Industry and is based out of Bangalore. He joined IBM India in 2005 and has since worked on and managed multiple teams like Enterprise Operating Systems Development, Support and Test in various positions. Pavan Kumar believes that being part of the TSANET would provide a good opportunity to meet experts from participating companies where we can closely collaborate sharing best practices and leveraging value
Australia Focus Group (Includes Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia)
North America Focus Group
Japan Focus Group
