What I do!
An innovative, creative IT solutions designer, with over twenty five years
experience. Since October 2009, I have been working as an Associate Partner
Citihub Ltd., as a Consultant continuing
to solve IT problems for the Investment Banks and broking houses in London. I
joined Citihub after 12 years at Sun
Microsystems where I had held several roles finishing my time there as
Chief Technologist, Global Systems Engineering Europe and having worked with
many of the world's leading companies, I was based in Sun's City office and
worked with the UK's and latterly Europe's leading banking, broking, telco and
media companies. I have experience in the IT industry working in Government,
Banking, Insurance and for two IT systems vendors. Over this period, I have
acquired massive experience in technology solutions design & development,
primarily using RDBMS software with UNIX computers. Throughout my career, I
have worked as a manager, team leader and individual contributor and built
several high performing teams.
I joined Sun
in 1997, initially in the Professional Services team, and worked later in the
UK Client Services Organisation. In Oct 2007, I became the Chief Technologist,
for the Global Sales and Services EMEA region, latterly Europe.
Before taking
on the role of Chief Technologist, I finished my time in the UK organisation by
acting as Chief Architect in the BT team, and leading the Sun JP Morgan Chase
team's technology team in EMEA. Previously, I led Sun's IT economics consulting
team in the UK, conducting consultancy engagements offering advice to customers
seeking to spend less, and before that I worked in both the bid & execution
phases of Sun's customer projects, in technical design or quality assurance
roles. I was appointed as 'Principal Engineer' during this period. My personal
record highlights include a large scale consolidation for one of the european
owned investment banks, also Instinet's Fixed Income Trading platfom,
Western Provident Association's Sybase/GEAC Migration from HP, and Sun
UK's first implementation Oracle Financials. The team I built, worked with a
number of Finance and Media customers building out London's community portals
and e-commerce capability.
Prior to Sun I
worked at Credit Suisse as Chief DBA for their northern european
Treasury where during 1996 I was responsible for their database platforms
consisting of Sybase, Oracle & Microsoft SQL Server systems on Sun &
DEC Alpha platforms. I have also first came across a number of capital markets
independendant software vendors' products while working here and was later able
to undertake numerous consulting and project engagments designing and
implementing system platforms for these investment banking industry
applications including Summit, GLOSS, Devon FX & Infinity.
For most of
1995 I worked for Steel, Burrill, Jones as a project manager. SBJ were
(and still are) Lloyds' insurance brokers and I managed a platform refresh
implementing a series of new business systems using Oracle RDBMS, client server
hardware and Oracle Financials. together with a desktop integration capability.
The applications were SBJ's first systems connecting to LIMnet.
Between 91
& 95, I worked at Pet Plan, the UK's first and largest pet
insurer. I left in 1995 as IT Director. I led the IS department in implementing
& managing business systems using Sybase SQL Server and client/server
hardware. At the time Pet Plan were Sybase's first UK insurance customer. The
systems performed, quotations, underwriting, claims management & reserving
& financial functions.
From 1989 to
1991, I worked for Pyramid Technology, then the world's leading
symmetric multi-processor, RISC systems vendor. I worked with customers such as
BT, London Transport, GEC Plessy and the Performing Right Society. I developed
the european benchmarking practice for high end, symmetric multiprocessing UNIX
systems, using RDBMSes such as Oracle, Sybase, Informix and CA-Ingres.
During 1987-89, I worked for
Jansen Green, one of Lloyds' of London's leading underwriting
syndicates. It was a technologically pioneering Lloyd's managing agency using
Oracle RDBMS and IBM mainframe systems.
From 1978 - 87, I worked for the
(then) Department of Employment, initially as a Civil Servant, then in
the IT department culminating in time as DBA for the Employment Census
database.
Professional Qualification
I was elected
a Fellow of the BCS in January 2009,
having obtained their Chartered IT Professional (CITP) accreditation in 2004. I
have the also passed various systems design and project management
accreditation exams including the NCC Systems Analysis certificate, the
Association of Project Managers PRINCE 2 Foundation exam and the Open group's
TOGAF practioner certificate. I joined the organisation that became the
"Chartered Institute of
Management" in 1994 and am a professional member, MCIM.
I am a graduate
economist & member of the Royal Economics Society.
I.T. Industry
In 2007, I was
appointed as Sun's representative on the EU Commission's software and serrvices
technology platform's steering committee. This is better known as NESSI.
From 2003 until
2006, I acted as one of the judges for the BCS's "Infrastructure Developer
of Year" competition. I have also served as member of user groups'
committees (Oracle & Sybase). .Through 1988 to 1995, I was a member of
firstly the Oracle User Group committee and then the Sybase User Group
comittee. I served as National Chairman for the UK Sybase User Group from
1995-1997.
Publications
"Migrating to the Solaris operating system" - Pepple, Down &
Levy - Prentice Hall 2003
"Optimising perfromance for write intensive environments
- Uk Sybase User Group May 1996
"An Overview of
the UK Computer Aided Software Engineering market - Oracle European User
Group Spring 1990
January 2005
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