Vanessa Thomas
Director, Board of Directors, Hope Air
changing K-12, education, customer success, values-based leadership, mentoring, mentoring women in early career, women pursuing Board of Directors careers, women in technology, business strategy and artificial intelligence, digital transformation, transitioning to cloud and software-as-a-service, artificial intelligence, technology
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Biography
Vanessa Thomas is an accomplished leader with over 20 years of global business experience and results across many functional domains. Thomas is a technology forward, SaaS experienced, Lean Six Sigma expert, AI strategy savvy executive with International MBA, and an appetite for learning. The vast majority of her career has involved direct engagement on corporate business strategy and revenue interlock planning, and direct input into cadence of Board of Director business reviews. Progressive leadership roles with Nortel Networks including institutionalizing Lean Six Sigma in company culture and management decision-making framework. She was chosen early in her career with Nortel for global leadership development. Tenure with Nortel culminated successful transitioning of a ~$1B global support services business to each of the Buyers as part of Canada’s largest global bankruptcy case. Thomas has held multiple senior leader roles with Avaya in global product management and sales organizations and led a large multi-disciplinary product team to design and bring to market a premier solution driving well over $500M annually. She transitioned to Sales and Business Development executive roles with Americas sales organization where annual accountability progressively grew from $40M to $800M+. She has earned top Global Renewal Sales Award, brokered multi-year multi-million dollar innovative win-win commercial agreements, developed repeatable approaches to SaaS transformation sales, and led rollout of Artificial Intelligence based solution to target accounts. Thomas is the Chief Experience and Innovation Officer with Onyen,, an independent advisor to CannScript, and on the board of Hope Air, a top 100 Charity in Canada.