Member Spotlight Archives

Nov 24 2020

Member Spotlight – WSCRC 2020 New Members

The Washington State China Relations Council welcomed ten new members in 2020, several who are highlighted below. 2020 created a number of new challenges for our organization and we are particularly fortunate to receive support from our members, old and new, to carry on our 41-year legacy and important work.

Visit Seattle

Visit Seattle is a private, nonprofit marketing organization serving as Seattle and King County’s official destination marketing organization (DMO) for more than 50 years. Through their efforts, they work to enhance the employment opportunities and economic prosperity of the region.

InSpur North America

Inspur is a leading data center and cloud computing solutions provider. Through engineering and innovation, Inspur aspires to deliver robust, performance-optimized, purpose-built solutions to address emerging technology arenas and challenges.

Himalaya Capital

Himalaya Capital is an investment management company founded in 1997. The company embraces the value investment principles of Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, and Charles Munger, and primarily focuses on investment opportunities in Asia and North America, both in publicly traded securities and privately held companies. They aim to achieve superior returns by investing in companies with substantial “economic moat” and great growth potential for the long term.

Banner Bank

Banner Bank is a Washington-charted commercial bank headquartered in Walla Walla, Washington. For over 130 years, the bank has been proud to serve the West with comprehensive financial services with core values that never go out of style: listen, learn, and help people and businesses reach their goals. Today—at over 200 locations across Oregon, Washington, California, and Idaho—Banner Bank delivers a high level of individual service as a community bank, while also offering competitive products some might expect to find only at a nationwide financial institution. Banner Bank is a member of the FDIC.

Michele Liang

Michele is a Global Real Estate Advisor of Realogics Sotheby’s International Realty in Seattle. Michele represents clients with downtown luxury condos, East Side estates, valuable land investments and commercial properties. Trilingual in both Cantonese and Mandarin, utilizes her knowledge of the Seattle real estate market to get her clients the best deal while understanding the emotional and financial demands of any transaction, evidenced with multi-million dollars in closed sales. Michele enjoys traveling and cooking with her husband, Bryan Brzeg and long walks with their micro poodle, Truffle.

Daniel Way

Daniel has worked as a tax advisor and accountant since 2011. He focuses on international tax and tax planning for cross-border activity. Daniel lives in the Seattle area, and in his spare time enjoys taking his two children on bike rides.

Ruidong Wu (Ryan)

Ruidong is currently a product manager at the local tech startup Wyze Labs, working on a new home monitoring experience that leverages modern IoT and cloud capabilities. Before studying at the University of Washington, he served at design consultancies and a successful startup in China on various tech products, from music streaming service to car infotainment systems.

Jeanne Demund

Jeanne first went to China in 1980, spending a year teaching English in Shenyang. Before founding an import distribution business which she ran for 20 years, she was China Trade Specialist and Trade Director with the State of Washington. Jeanne is currently a principal in Two Rivers Manufacturing, an importer and distributor of motorcycle accessories.

Oct 29 2020

Puget Sound Business Journal Honors Two WSCRC Board Members

The Puget Sound Business Journal (PSBJ), the region’s premier business news publication, has recently honored two of WSCRC’s Board Members.

WSCRC’s Board Chairman, Marc Berger, was recently honored as one of the Puget Sound Business Journal’s Top 40 under 40. Started 22 years ago, this program identifies people under the age of 40 who are dynamic leaders in the business community.

In addition to his role as the Chairman of the Washington State China Relations Council, Marc is a Vice President and Partner at Nyhus Communications. Marc oversees approximately 50% of the company’s overall revenue and works on strategic development. Prior to his move to Seattle in 2013, Marc worked for the National Committee on U.S-China Relations.

The PSBJ revealed this week that WSCRC Board Member Dean Jones of Realogics Sotheby’s International Realty was named to its list of the 100 most powerful, influential businesspeople in Washington in 2020.

Realogics Sotheby’s International Realty is a Seattle‐based real estate consultancy and brokerage specializing in market research, product development, marketing and sales solutions for new construction, multi‐family, and resale properties of all categories. As CEO, Dean Jones leads the Pacific Northwest’s largest affiliate within the global real estate network.

We congratulate both of our board members on their awards.

Aug 27 2019

Member Spotlight – iSoftStone North America

iSoftStone is a leading global information technology services and solutions provider. They partner with clients to create innovative software solutions and provide best-in-class consulting services. Backed by proven processes, innovation, and a strong engagement track record, iSoftStone navigates clients through today’s challenges while helping them prepare for demands of the future.

iSoftStone North America employees work across offices in Seattle, New York, Virginia, and Toronto. Headquartered in Beijing with over 56 offices and 40,000+ employees around the world, iSoftStone understands what it takes to deliver success on a global scale.

iSoftStone North America and the WSCRC

iSoftStone North America has been a long-time partner of the WSCRC and proudly hosted WSCRC events at our headquarters. iSoftStone works closely with the WSCRC to promote stronger relationships with China throughout North America.

How iSoftStone helps clients reach their business objectives

iSoftStone’s singular approach, working across multiple disciplines to optimize knowledge transfer and execution, sets them apart from the competition. Beginning with research, strategy, and analysis, their solutions are based, first and foremost, on understanding client business objectives and developing targeted solutions to help successfully realize those objectives.

Industry leaders such as Microsoft, University of Washington, LivePerson, Facebook, Tapestry, Revlon, and Boeing are just some of the local partners iSoftStone engages with on a variety of technology and marketing projects.

Their areas of focused engagement include:

Azure

Azure is an exciting, and demanding, space for their clients. iSoftStone has developed Azure applications and cloud services that have spurred rapid digital transformation for their clients. They lead complex cloud migrations, build infrastructure and cloud apps, and manage complete projects from start to finish.

Adobe

iSoftStone has helped clients unleash the full power of Adobe Experience Manager, a content management system with deep integrations into many platforms. They have designed, built, and launched new customer experiences for global brands such as Microsoft. Their work results in reactive customer experiences that are popular with end users, and provide our clients with invaluable data for their business.

Artificial Intelligence

Having built sophisticated chatbots for clients, iSoftStone is adept at harnessing A.I. to function in a variety of platforms, from Facebook to Microsoft 365 applications. These chatbots serve as a first line of help for end users, while also helping businesses understand and act on customer demand.

Data Maturity

iSoftStone leads clients through a variety of challenging data transformations. Global brands turn to iSoftStone North America when they need help turning isolated data into a truly effective data warehouse or data lake. iSoftStone understands the deep impact that data maturity has on businesses of any size. Clients love the holistic approach to data and rely on them to lead sweeping data transformations.

BPA

Business Process Automation: We design and implement software automation solutions that enable our clients to scale, reduce cost and improve quality across their end-to-end business processes. We design, implement and support the leading UiPath RPA (robotic process automation) solution for our Fortune 1000 clients. RPA is on the journey to Intelligent Automation, and leverages powerful cognitive (AI) capabilities.

Accessibility

Microsoft’s Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs division (CELA) relies on iSoftStone to bring deeper levels of inclusivity to their corporate portals. Microsoft is also using iSoftStone North America to bring ground-breaking American Sign Language translation services to life. Sharing their passions is part of the iSoftStone culture, and they host a bi-monthly Accessibility Meetup at their headquarters in Kirkland.

What sets iSoftStone apart

The world-class iSoftStone team treat their clients as partners, value face-to-face consulting, and leverage their broad global reach. The backgrounds of 300+ North America, full-time consulting professionals bring a vast array of experiences to each engagement in the areas of research, project management, user experience design, marketing strategy, and engineering/IT services. The combination of their North American consulting teams with their offshore technology centers of excellence provide scale and value, while maintaining best-in-class quality. As Microsoft and Adobe partners, they are also able to attract and retain the best talent with their training and retention policies.

Want to know more about iSoftStone North America? Contact them via email or their Web site.