From an early age, Bernard Francis Kyle, CEO of Cloudbusting, was drawn to technology as a career. Curiously, that connection stemmed from his father’s music archive, a collection of short wave radios and evolving stereo systems. Bernard found himself fascinated by the inner workings of the machinery and the sounds’ ability to affect collective consciousness through an apparatus that effectively records and transcends time. He soon recognized that the world of technical innovation contributes to culture and humanity in profound ways. Accordingly, even as a youngster, he committed to concentrate his future vocation on promoting technology. He vowed to become an expert on how data transmission and analysis can benefit recipients. Ultimately, Bernard’s facility to communicate between the business users and the technical program creators became his professional excellence.
While working in his first full time position within an IT department, Silicon Valley had just begun booming. Bernard was immersed in the right career at an opportune time. After seeking to expand into B2C sales, he was recruited into a company in the Bay Area where he began successfully selling products for the growing Apple consumer market.
After being inspired by his supervisor’s work ethic and drive, he followed his VP of sales into another company, resulting in an even more significant career impact. He commenced a new direction within a tech start up in the application server space focused on B2B. Promptly after the first funding was secured, he was hired as a direct contributor where he became the lead.
Shortly after that business was acquired, he was recruited by a company in London for a prime position in sales management, as well as inside sales operations to coordinate sales across the UK and Western Europe. His lifelong attraction to settings where diverse cultures do business and celebrate art made the move to London a perfect fit for his personal and career interests
Following years of success in Europe, Bernard desired to return to California to determine the next step. He transitioned back to the Bay Area and became a director for OtherMinds, a not-for-profit organization established for the promotion of new music and archive preservation. There he reconnected to his initial inspiration by directing a conservation project of audio recordings from the 20th century with a technical preservation team.
Subsequent to the completion of the arts project, he returned to the tech startup world as an Account Manager for strategic financial services at Embarcadero Technologies, a company that empowered him to evolve cross-national financial business with New York. Two years later he joined GoldenGate Software, a company later acquired by Oracle. Through that role he learned from the emerging field of real-time data targeting the global Fortune 1000 accounts, and subsequently established a $2.7 million pipeline in under 6 months.
Bernard was then recruited into Rainstor (a Teradata acquisition) to lead sales for the burgeoning field of Big Data. In this role he reduced costs of managing large information sets, particularly in the financial service and communications centers of NYC and the UK. He also established a $7.7 million dollar pipeline, which quickly yielded $2.5 million in revenue in under three years.
Bernard’s next promotion led him to become the Sales and Business Development Executive at Striim, a real-time streaming integration and operational intelligence platform providing high volume data acquisition. He successfully led sales prospecting and built a $15 million dollar pipeline within green field territory by building accounts with leading Fortune 500 firms, including Apple, Morgan Stanley, Visa and T-Mobile.
Later, an opportunity at Fivetran (acquired by HVR) would once again provide Bernard the opportunity to work internationally. He was hired to lead a team of six in the U.S. and Europe for HVR, as the Global Business Development manager. Within a year, the generated a $11 million dollar pipeline, which resulted in $4.6 million in closed business. Nine months after the merger, he led his team to achieve a $9.5 million dollar pipeline and $700K in closed business.
Throughout every professional role he has taken, Bernard’s consistent successful strategy is to build a high performance environment for the business development team. He remains committed to training his teams on consistent, effective strategies to navigate large organizations, to identify pain points, as well as to consistently target influencers and decision makers.
With the recent launch of his consulting firm, Cloudbusting, LLC, Bernard eagerly commenced the next chapter of his career. His latest trajectory enables him to tap his talents. Bernard continues to excel in bringing innovative new technology built by startup organizations into the technical portfolios of large corporations around the world.
During his spare time, Bernard remains an entrepreneur by assisting tech and arts sectors as a pro-bono and consulting advisor. He also collects contemporary art, including an extensive collection of prints, drawings, photographs and artists’ exhibition posters. In fact, Bernard has successfully produced several art projects, including films, music releases and artists’ exhibitions. To this day, understanding and harnessing the link between art and technology continue to bring him professional success and personal fulfillment.