Vigience Management Team

Markus Stierli (Representative Director)

Markus is the Representative Director of the firm. He leads all business development, marketing and product development activities, and also still consults Vigience's clients on IT strategy. He founded Vigience and comes from a strong SAP background, where he spent more than 11 years in roles such as Consultant, Chief Architect and Program Director. As long-time head of technology R&D at the corporate development center SAP Labs Japan, Markus drove several SAP inventions and patents in the area of Internet technology, mobile technology, Wireless ASP (WASP) business models, RFID, and Strategic Enterprise Management. He successfully delivered mobile & wireless products together with partners such as Microsoft (USA), NTT DoCoMo and Sharp. Markus also spent considerable time at SAP's head office in Germany as de-escalation manager for large, highly escalated customer projects in the area of SAP Logistics Execution and Direct-Store-Delivery (DSD). Prior to the founding of the SAP Labs Japan, he was part of the team that created SAP Japan's phenomenal growth in the mid-90's and was the responsible manager for the Japanese market introduction of SAP's major Internet (3.1+), business framework architecture (4.0+) and Enjoy (4.6+) releases/initiatives.

Dr. Andrew McLeod (Director, Consulting Services)

Andrew is a Director with the firm and leads all Consulting Services. He is a Cambridge educated applied mathematician turned SAP consultant. Prior to founding Vigience, he led SAP's global engineering services team for Mobile Business within the product technology group. The group's mission was to ensure that problem projects were brought back - and subsequently stayed - on track, and that products being developed satisfied real market needs. Prior to joining SAP he worked at Fusion Systems Japan, where as a developer he created various mission-critical real-time systems, ranging from market data feed and electronic order routing systems, to systems that integrated with servers run by SWIFT. Later, as a senior client account manager he was the sole point of contact for all production issues and implementations, as well as responsible for developing new business opportunities with several top-tier investment banks and distilling conflicting customer requirements into a coherent product suite evolution strategy. He also co-initiated a systematic PMP training course for employees and a very successful offsite training program. Andrew cut his teeth creating parallel supercomputer simulations of the evolution of magnetic field in the solar interior while serving as special guest researcher at Japan's Communications Research Laboratory's space weather division.

Jason Cherry (Director, SAP Consulting Services)

Jason is a Director with the firm and leads the SAP-centric consulting services at Vigience. He is a Yale / Oxford educated engineer with 10 years of real-life experience at SAP in roles as consultant, developer and program manager before joining Vigience. His SAP background includes the definition and delivery of a state-of-the-art Intellectual Property management solution based on SAP CRM and IS Media for one of Japan’s most innovative companies. As a SAP Labs Program Manager, he managed the overall architecture, development, and delivery efforts for CRM Handheld Sales, a product suite consisting of middleware and backend (R/3, CRM) integration tools, client-side development and deployment tools, and the application running on this infrastructure. A capable project-manager, he managed this SAP-Microsoft joint-development project with a 40-developer team, and later headed up SAP's Mobile Sales (R/3) product development before taking on Mobile Direct Store Delivery (DSD) as project manager. In his earliest work at SAP, Jason was an internal business consultant, focusing primarily on business process reengineering and "applying SAP to SAP". As part of this, he designed, implemented, and rolled out various SAP-based solutions in SAP Japan.

Marc Hrabak (Head of Operations)

Marc is the Head of Operations of the firm and leads the Finance, Human Resources and Administrative functions of the company. He is responsible for building and implementing internal processes and systems that support Vigience’s strategic and operating plans. Marc has more than 12 years of experience with finance and administrative programs over a broad range of organizations. Prior to joining Vigience, Marc realised a dream of his own by starting and building up a coffee and wine bar in Hawaii ("Café Marc Aurel" with the tag line: "Living the good life"). Over several years, he built this into a thriving business with 18 staff, a loyal customer base and a lot of fun. Prior to that, Marc worked 9 years at SAP and is an old-time SAP veteran (D000340) from SAP's Finance section. He set up SAP AG's global cost center structure in 1992 before rolling out financial processes in Asia. His roles included financial analyst for Asia Pacific, Controller for SAP Hong Kong as well as project lead for the set up of the Finance & Administration department at SAP Japan. Later, as head of controlling and internal business consulting for North East Asia, Marc oversaw the global rollout and operation of FI, CO, AM, HR, MM, and MIS.