Paul Smith

Paul leads the commercial side of C4C Group. His focus is the commercials: how clients acquire technology well, how deals are structured and negotiated, and how vendor relationships are managed to the client’s advantage rather than the vendor’s.

He brings more than three decades in enterprise technology, the most recent fifteen years across EMC, VCE and Dell EMC. Latterly he was EMEA Senior Director and GSP and Telco Lead at Dell EMC, and before that EMEA Senior Director at VCE, where he oversaw the strategic direction and operations of the converged infrastructure joint venture and drove the adoption of converged and cloud platforms across the region.

Earlier, across a decade at EMC, Paul was EMEA Client Director for Investment Banking, running the company’s largest and most demanding financial services accounts, including JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch. That is where the negotiation pedigree was forged, at the sharp end of the biggest enterprise technology deals in the City. Before EMC he held senior commercial roles at Veritas and built CSF Group into a leading European partner for Digital.

It is this combination, deep enterprise storage and infrastructure knowledge paired with decades of front line commercial negotiation, that lets Paul help clients buy better. He asks the difficult questions, leads the negotiation, and keeps your vendor relationship intact, so you get a stronger outcome without spending your own relationship capital to get it.

Where Paul focuses

With a career spent on the commercial side of the largest enterprise technology deals, Paul concentrates on helping organisations acquire technology on the right terms, structure and negotiate agreements that hold up over time, and keep control of the relationship with their vendors. It is the independent, client first perspective that comes from having sat on the other side of the table for thirty years.

Career at a glance