I moved to this organisation during October 2007 in order to work with more Tier 1 clients and to work in an organisation with more maturity in the consulting field.

My main work has been with ING Bank in Amsterdam and LloydsTSB in London, I have also been engaged with a number of other clients on more specific basis and have been involved in some pre-sales work.

The ING work was related to a number of areas in the identification of a Storage Transformation, in particular I was involved in the running of a Storage RFP covering 9 vendors, and the development of an Operational Readiness status related to transforming the environment to alternative vendors products. Other work involved the identification of particular storage savings from storage wastage and mapping of the overall environment.

Current work has been the requirements gathering and recommendation of a platform for Development and Test based on a number of Enterprise (including EMC DMX and HDS USP-V) and Mid-Range (including HDS AMS, EMC CX and NetApp products) options. This has now lead to a high level design related to a NetApp solution.

The LloydsTSB work related to the Technical assurance of the Storage Transformation solution identified. This work involved working with LloydsTSB and IBM, the chosen vendor, to ensure the solution being provided was in line with the original proposal and that the solution would be fit for purpose and deliver the benefits identified.

I moved to this independent storage consultancy firm to take on the role of developing new direct consulting business. This work has involved defining storage services, customer presentations and proposal writing and the delivery of a number of storage white papers.

During my tenure we were awarded a contract related to strategic review work for Ipsos MORI, with a number of other contracts close to agreement.

The work with Ipsos MORI was to develop a storage strategy for the organisation. This is similar to the work carried out at 3i during 2006. This work included a number of review meetings with staff including the CIO and a number of other director level staff to identify business needs for IT, together with the completion of a storage audit to review the existing data profile. This information was used to develop requirements for the storage infrastructure which has then been used to develop a high level infrastructure and recommendations for presentation back to the CIO.

I left TPP in order to move to a more mature but still small Storage consultancy.

My role was to provide a range of storage related services across the broad range of solutions including overall architectures, data storage (SAN Array, SAN infrastructure, NAS, data replication etc), backup and recovery (including the definition of what backup is used for and what it should not be used for. Disk and Tape based backups, centralised backup of remote data etc), data archiving (File and email archiving to manage data volumes required for backup and maintenance of records for compliance requirements), and Storage management etc.

Normally for larger projects the day to day management of the delivery is undertaken by a full time project manager with me providing advice as required. For smaller projects I have undertaken the project management role. I am normally involved in the resource estimates and the development of the project plan and where appropriate am involved in the project initiation processes.

My role includes solution definition, vendor alignment, design, and delivery management. I am normally working on a number of solutions where I am the Technical Authority so will often have staff on several projects across the UK who will look to me for guidance with the solutions being delivered.

Part of this role includes definition of availability requirements and design of solutions to provide the required levels including Disaster Recovery. I have participated in training courses related to Crisis management. I have also been involved with assisting clients defining their DR and BC processes.

I have been involved in the definition of internal storage practices and have defined a Reference Storage Architecture for use by the organisation as the baseline for its storage offerings. I have also been heavily involved in evaluation some new to market storage virtualisation solutions.

I am a certified EMC Architect and have passed Storage Networking exams with Cisco and Brocade. I have regular exposure to other manufacturers mainly IBM, HP, Network Appliance, Symantec etc. In addition I have passed more generic storage exams from SNIA.

I have a foundation level ITIL certification and have worked in defining delivery process on a number of projects.

Customers I have been involved with over the last year include, Nationwide Building Society, Bank of England, BUPA, Department for Transport, Virgin Media ( NTL-Telewest), Smiths Aerospace, Novartis, Vodafone, Norfolk County Council, and HML.

Storage Consulting Practice Technical Manager August 2001 - September 2002

As Technical Manager I was responsible for 13 storage consultants and involved with up to 40 consultants with storage related skills. Following the take over of GEITS at the end of 2001, I initially shared the Technical manager role then due to my unique technical skills moved to the Technical Architects role.

The role was to initially assist setting up an HP consulting division within the organisation. This included defining the group, defining services, working with the sales team to assist selling services and delivering services across the full range of HP Open systems products.

Projects worked on in this role have included design of a highly available SAN based backup environment for an Investment house, and specification/design of replacement application production environment for a Local Transport Authority to improve performance and availability.

I contracted with CMG assigned to DHL. The project was to manage the migration of their distributed systems around Europe to their new Datacentre in the UK. The majority of this work was the analysis and documenting of the systems in Belgium followed by migration to the UK of the systems.

This role was related to the implementation of an HP-UX/EMC Symmetrix solution implemented in two East Midlands locations. The work included the configuration of the systems, Timefinder and SRDF configuration and appropriate custom scripting.

The role covered the implementation and support of HP-UX systems at various sites across Europe (UK, France, Italy, and Germany). This included definition of the hardware solution, ordering, implementation and maintenance. Work also included application installat8onand configuration including SAP and Oracle, together with appropriate custom scripting.

Apr 1995 – Jan 1997 European UNIX Systems Manager
Mar 1994 – Apr 1995 Site Technical Support Manager – Haguenau, France

1979-1985 Retail Banking to Head of Charges Section
1985-1989 Programmer COBOL IMS MVS
1989-1991 Support Analyst MVS and PC Technical Infrastructure
1991 Product Manager PC based Development Platform Team leading up to 10 Staff.
1992-1994 Support Consultant PC environment for development and office + RS6000 UNIX environment implementation