Paul Freeman, President, is an industry professional with more than 13 years experience working for and with resellers, Solution Providers and manufacturers of high-tech products and services. His experience has given him an exceptional view on what it takes to be a successful business in today’s technology industry.

In 2001 Paul founded Professional Development Partners, a business consulting, training and business optimization firm specializing in the needs of technology focused businesses and their indirect channels. In doing so, Paul set a foundation in which to grow other programs and businesses to help fulfill his business vision.

In 2002, Paul started Coast Solutions Group and grew that company into a multi-million-dollar IT services distributorship servicing Fortune 100 manufacturers, distributors and resellers by leveraging a network of over 1200 independent service providers and over 20,000 technical resources to deliver packaged and custom private label services to their end-customers. In 2007, Coast Solutions Group was successfully acquired by and integrated into DynTek Corporation (www.dyntek.com).

Paul has been a featured speaker for Cisco, Microsoft and Ingram Micro and has developed sales and marketing programs for more than a dozen manufacturers, including Microsoft, Cisco, APC, Citrix, HP and Avaya.

His dedication to providing “programs that work” puts him in a class of executives and sales motivators who get the results that companies need in order to grow. His vision of creating a new breed of highly empowered and effective VARs and Solution Providers is a vision that he follows and is the foundation of his success.

Paul lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife and two sons.

David Bright, Principal Consultant has over 28 years experience in the computer industry and specifically with major vendors and solution providers across the world. This experience covers pre-sales, sales and marketing, as well as technical consulting, design and implementation, and includes the development, sales and delivery of solutions, services and offerings to enterprise customers directly and through partner channels in all major industry segments, with a special emphasis on partner channel development and partner enablement.

This comprehensive background, coupled with a deep understanding of the IT industry and a strong passion for partner channels has allowed David to focus on creating workable, pragmatic enablement frameworks, strategies, guides, tools and templates. These have been applied with great success in major vendors including Microsoft and Cisco, and also to large, global solutions provider companies such as Tata Consultancy Services, HP Services, and Unisys. Having started his career in the electronics and telecommunications arena, David studied Computer Science and Information Systems Management and moved into the IT world working on very large IBM mainframe systems and networks, both as a customer engineer and as a systems engineer. David then moved into the client server arena and designed, sold, implemented and supported enterprise-class solutions on various platforms, including Microsoft, Unix, OS/2, and NetWare—all in the role of solutions provider.

For about 6 years David has provided partner enablement development services to companies and vendors such as Cisco, with a specific focus on the development of practical, usable content and guidance aimed at helping partners to grow their businesses through the adoption of best practices and reusable templates, tools, strategies and methodologies.

As a testament to the quality of his work, David has received multiple outstanding performance awards from every company that he has worked for, including the prestigious “Circle of Excellence” award from Microsoft. David is originally from Cape Town, South Africa and now lives in Chino, Southern California.