Phil Verghis has been called a “brilliant strategist and innovator” by the Service & Support Professionals Association and is a highly sought after speaker around the world. He is a past chairperson of HDI’s Strategic Advisory Board, the largest membership-based technical support organization in the world.

Phil has received numerous industry accolades, including the only two-time winner of Service News magazine’s “Service 25” award from given to people who made a significant impact in the field of service and support. He was also named a “leader and legend” by STI Knowledge for making some of the most notable contributions to the support industry over the last decade.

His book, The Ultimate Customer Support Executive, was on Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge recommended list and was called “by far the most intelligent book on how to manage support organizations” by the Association of Support Professionals.

Prior to founding The Verghis Group, Phil was vice president of infrastructure support at Akamai Technologies where he started the global customer care and service delivery teams that handled mission-critical customer lifecycle support for corporate customers around the world.

At a key point in Akamai’s history following the dot com crash, Phil was asked to take on three other VP jobs addition to Global Service Delivery. This included the world’s largest distributed IP network (25,000 assets comprising 15,000 servers in 60 countries), the global Operations role and most of the CIO role. His leadership of an interdisciplinary team saved the company $33 million on an annualized basis in network Cost of Goods Sold while network traffic tripled during that period, to tens of billions of hits per day. Akamai grew from $4M in annual revenue in 1999 to $161M in 2003, and became profitable in 2004.

Prior to Akamai, Phil worked at Duke University and at the University of New Hampshire.

Phil has a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and an MBA — both from the University of New Hampshire. He is an adjunct faculty member at the University of New Hampshire, where he teaches in the MBA program.