Steven De Vlieger

After graduating with a Master of Industrial Sciences in Electronics, Steven started his career in 1999 (just in time for the famous IT “millennium bug”) with INS, an IT integrator company. In this role, Steven worked as a network engineer at Cisco Systems, where he focused on mastering Cisco WAN/LAN network, wireless, voice, and video technologies. The knowledge he gained, led - after a gruelling 8-hour lab exam - in 2004 to the highest Cisco technical certification: CCIE.

Steven continued his stint in telecom by joining Orange in 2005 and British Telecom (BT) in 2014. His technical role evolved from implementation engineer to design, to business consultant, and finally Unified Communications solution sales and business development. In these jobs, Steven got to know Microsoft for the first time: both from a partner and alliance management point of view and a technical perspective (in the field of collaborative tools, think of Skype, Lync, Teams). The 2005 – 2019 “telecom era” ended with a 100% focus on sales developing and closing complex deals with typical deal sizes of 5M€+ and achieving 20-40M€+ yearly sales targets.

While working at Orange, Steven invested in his personal development by graduating with an Executive MBA from Vlerick Leuven – Gent Management School.

In 2019, Steven moved to the world of consulting by joining Accenture as a Sales Director. Initially, Steven was responsible for driving sales growth for the Oracle Practice in Human Capital Management (HCM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). Steven also took the role of Alliance Manager towards Oracle and internally helped the delivery teams build out Oracle capabilities. Later, in 2021, Steven took the Sales Director Client Group Resources role and built out the sales team for the Accenture Belux clients in the Utilities, Chemicals, and Natural Resources industries. Steven successfully achieved the Client Group sales targets each year, while maintaining targeted gross profitability margins. He increased the share of wallet (upsell) of Accenture services in existing clients and opened up / hunted for new accounts on the target market account list e.g. by re-entering a large Utility company through a structured business origination plan.

Between 2019 and 2023 at Accenture, Steven expanded his knowledge about Data & AI concepts, “move to cloud” projects (by working with e.g. Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure), and how these can bring business value to customers.

Steven joined element61 in September 2023.