About Us — Ngenium AI

A services-only engineering firm, built deliberately.

Ngenium AI is a services-only IT engineering firm headquartered in Plano, Texas, delivering senior engineer led network, security, cloud, and AI infrastructure work for enterprises, mid-market organizations, and Cisco channel partners.

We never resell hardware or software. Carrying no product margin means our recommendations follow your architecture and your interests — not a vendor price list. What we sell is the bench: people who have stood up production networks — and now the AI applications running on them — in healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and the public sector, and who stay until the environment is stable.

Multi-vendor by default. We design for the network you have and the one you're moving to.

Architecture & delivery in one team. The engineer who designs it is the engineer who cuts it over.

Operational discipline. Method-of-procedure, rollback, and observability in every change window.

The co-founders.

Three operators with more than 80 years of combined enterprise technology experience — infrastructure, partnerships, and professional services.

Cuong Tran

Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer & President

Cuong Tran is the Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President of Ngenium, where he leads the company's vision, strategy, and delivery of next-generation AI infrastructure, cloud, and data center solutions. With more than 30 years of experience in enterprise technology, Cuong has built a reputation for helping organizations design, deploy, and operate mission-critical infrastructure that powers modern AI and digital transformation initiatives.

Before co-founding Ngenium, Cuong served as CEO of Lumos, where he grew the company into one of Cisco's premier Data Center Specialized Integrator (DSI) and MINT partners. Under his leadership, Lumos became recognized for delivering complex data center, networking, and infrastructure solutions before ultimately being acquired.

Cuong holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Jonathan Matias

Co-Founder · Global Partnerships & Alliances

Jonathan Matias is the Co-Founder, Global Partnerships & Alliances at Ngenium. With more than 25 years of experience in the technology space, Jonathan leads the company's global partnership and alliance strategy, working closely with OEM technology providers, channel partners, IT consulting firms, and customers to accelerate business growth and deliver innovative solutions.

Prior to co-founding Ngenium, Jonathan spent 16 years at Cisco Systems, where he held leadership roles focused on global partnerships, business development, go-to-market strategy, and operations. Throughout his career, he has built strategic relationships across networking, cybersecurity, cloud, data center, AI infrastructure, and observability, helping organizations develop scalable partnerships that deliver measurable business outcomes.

Jonathan holds a Master of Business Administration from Babson College and brings a unique combination of technology expertise, partner ecosystem leadership, and business strategy to help organizations accelerate innovation and growth.

Shawn Boyd

Co-Founder · Global Professional Services Leader

Shawn Boyd is a lifelong entrepreneur and IT leader with 25+ years of experience building, scaling, and exiting technology businesses — now focused on helping organizations turn AI ambition into production reality.

He founded ARP Technologies in 1995 and grew it into one of Canada's largest Cisco Learning Partners, delivering consulting, training, and curriculum development globally. Along the way he became a published Cisco Press author and served as Senior Technical Editor across multiple industry publications.

In 2016 he exited ARP through a merger with EnterOne, then spent nine years scaling the business globally as VP of Canada and later CIO — growing APJC professional services revenue 3x in under two years and overseeing Ottawa data center operations. The company was later acquired by Trainocate, where he supported the transition.

At Ngenium, Shawn focuses on one thing: execution. Most organizations struggle to move AI from idea to production, held back by infrastructure complexity, security concerns, and skills gaps. He leads the end-to-end AI enablement practice that bridges that gap — from strategy and architecture through secure, scalable deployment.

The bench behind every engagement.

Data center, AI platform, and client-side leadership — the people you'll actually be working with.

Jeff Telling

Global Sales Leader

Jeff Telling is the VP of Global Sales at Ngenium, where he leads the company’s global sales strategy and execution across direct sales, channel and partner routes to market, and strategic alliances — including deepening relationships across Cisco’s sales teams, leveraging its DSI and MINT partner ecosystem status. With more than two decades of experience building and scaling partner-led revenue engines in networking, cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure, Jeff has spent his career turning vendor relationships into measurable, repeatable revenue.

Prior to joining Ngenium, Jeff held senior channel and alliance leadership roles at Sisense, Gigamon, Keysight, and Lumen, and spent six years at Cisco Systems in partner and cloud sales leadership. At Gigamon, he consolidated a sprawling partner ecosystem into a small set of high-impact strategic relationships, driving substantial growth in alliance revenue in the process; at Keysight, he rebuilt the channel program and meaningfully scaled partner-sourced revenue as a share of the business. Along the way, he has launched hyperscaler and marketplace go-to-market motions with AWS, Azure, and GCP, and built the co-sell relationships that turn a vendor’s field organization into an active revenue channel.

Jeff holds a Bachelor of Arts from Michigan State University.

Jason Banker

Senior Data Center Engineer

Jason Banker is a Senior Data Center Engineer at Ngenium, where he helps lead the engineering team into the future of AI. With more than 25 years in technology, Jason brings deep expertise in architecting, designing, implementing, and troubleshooting enterprise network infrastructure.

Before joining Ngenium, he worked extensively in the data center space as an Infrastructure Architect and Engineer, partnering with customers to meet their business objectives both strategically and tactically in dynamic project environments. He is a subject matter expert in enterprise-level cloud solutions, with a focus on Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), VXLAN, Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC), Nexus, and other networking technologies.

Isaiah Laughlin

AI Solutions Engineer

Isaiah Laughlin is an AI Solutions Engineer at Ngenium, focused on building and deploying AI applications on enterprise Kubernetes platforms. He brings a strong infrastructure foundation — four years as a network engineer delivering Cisco ACI and Nexus OS deployments, plus two years in data center engineering — into modern OpenShift and AI-ops work.

Over the past two years, Isaiah has shifted into OpenShift and AI application delivery, with deep emphasis on Isovalent Cilium, IT-ops infrastructure, and production CNI design. He has stood up OpenShift clusters with Cilium as the primary CNI, deployed Cisco AI Defense on-prem, and brought LLMs into real customer environments — bridging networking, platform engineering, and applied AI so organizations can run secure, scalable AI workloads on their own infrastructure.

Greg Ballantyne

Data Center Engineer

Greg Ballantyne is a Data Center Engineer at Ngenium with 10 years of experience in the IT industry. He specializes in Cisco networking and data center technologies, helping customers design and implement scalable, secure, and high-performance infrastructure with a focus on modern data center and AI-ready environments.

Working closely with customers, Greg delivers enterprise infrastructure solutions that support virtualization, automation, and next-generation workloads. His hands-on technical expertise and commitment to delivering reliable, efficient deployments help organizations build resilient and future-ready data center environments.

Dipen Shah

Senior Manager, Business Development

Paul Ohrem

Director of Operations

Paul Ohrem is an accomplished, versatile, and results-oriented services leader with extensive experience in Fortune 500, start-up, and growth companies. Prior to joining Ngenium, he held management roles at JP Morgan, Skyline-ATS, and Juniper Networks, most recently serving as Director of Professional Services at EnterOne.

Throughout his career, Paul has provided leadership and guidance to technical teams, finance, project management, account teams, business development, clients, and partners globally. His approach is one of open communication and accessibility, and as Director of Operations he plays a multi-faceted role across all aspects of Ngenium. As a former customer himself, he has never lost perspective on the vital importance of building lasting relationships and delivering exceptional value.

The engineers you meet are the engineers who do the work.