GUS MAIKISH has over 40 years of experience in IT, sales, business strategy and management. He was at IBM for 37 years working primarily with financial services firms. For his last eight years at IBM, he was the IBM managing director for Citigroup with the global responsibility, including revenue and profit, for IBM’s largest financial services customer. Prior to this assignment he was vice president of sales for the financial services sector. He had management responsibility for the largest 300 financial firms in the United States and over 200 sales professionals. Gus was promoted to that position after successfully managing the Merrill Lynch account team as a certified client executive. Gus managed the IBM Merrill Lynch sales team for eight years. He also held sales and sales management positions on other financial services accounts including JP Morgan, The New York Federal Reserve Bank, Irving Trust, US Trust and National Westminster USA.

Gus also worked at the corporate level of IBM as an internal marketing consultant. There he was responsible for reviewing strategies for a number of IBM product sets as well as IBM sales in Asia. Prior to joining IBM in 1972, Gus worked in application development, served in the US Army, and completed an MBA degree at Pace University. He is currently a guest lecturer at the Columbia University Business School on the subject of Global Account Management. Since retiring from IBM, he has provided coaching and development for IBM’s sales teams in Vietnam and helped to establish business relationships with bank executives there on behalf of IBM. He has also worked on account management transformation projects at Xerox and several other firms as a part of the Insight Group consulting team where he is a managing partner.