Rick Wade -EDS

Eric Wade (who is known as Rick) started his professional IT career as a COBOL programmer for the Zales Corporation. From there he joined AT&T where he became the testing leader and managed the production support organization for residential lease telephone division.

When AT&T went through divestiture Rick joined the Lucent Corporation and this is where he started his SAP career which has now spanned 18 years. He worked on Lucent's implementation of SAP for the corded and cordless telephone set division as a Basis Administrator and Change Management Coordinator. During this two year period he commuted from Plano TX to NJ each week. While home in Plano for a weekend Rick met his wife Terry who is an elementary PE teacher. While dating and commuting, Terry commented that she could be "nice" to anyone for two days in a row which translated into finding his next position with EDS which was local in Plano.

Rick was key member in the development of the ERP Hosting Delivery model for EDS. He constructed the SAP Basis and PeopleSoft Administration Leveraged Delivery Organization and developed the vision and strategy for the onshore/offshore delivery model. He assisted in the modeling of the sales strategy which increased the win rate for EDS to over 70 percent for re-bid, add-on scope and new logo sales.

After EDS, Rick took a position at Xerox as the SAP Hosting Director. Rick centralized the Basis resources to better support the client base. While there Rick's leadership reduced severity one issues by 76 percent.He led the organization through the process to attain SAP Global Hosting and SAP Cloud Hosting Partner Certifications.Rick also supported Solution Architecting and Sales Support.

Rick is an avid bicyclist and completed the Triple Bypass which is a 120 mile one day ride which summits the Squaw, Loveland and Vail passes.