RESPONSIBILITIES

• Support business development by creating a vision for value added services and distinguished operational excellence in the highly competitive and highly regulated medical device industry. Directly support key blue-chip clients in their demands for security, confidentiality and expedience of the integrated services we provided to them.

• Manage build and configuration of all deployed OSS solutions on multiple architectures and platforms; AIX 5.3, Solaris 10, Linux (CentOS, OpenSUSE, Debian, Gentoo), OpenBSD and FreeBSD, including the layering of virtualisation (Xen and Vmware) for build and rollout of operational needs.

• Control source code and patching from numerous OSS repositories (GIT, Mercurial, Subversion and CVS) and build both operational systems (OpenSolaris, Linux, OpenBSD and FreeBSD) and services (e.g. Exim, Tomcat, Samba) as well as integration strategy for packaging systems and dependencies.

• Develop patches for custom settings and failed builds (primarily for the OSS components building on AIX under GCC) manage these patches in-line with main repository updates and develop build and testing scenarios for roll-out of system updates.

• Management of critical business systems for database and storage (Solaris 10 / MySQL / ZFS), authentication and SSO (AIX 5.3 / OpenLDAP / Kerberos) as well as office services (OpenOffice / Java) and networking (IPSEC / VPN / DNS / etc.).

ACHIEVEMENTS

• Development of integrated business toolkit (Zope/Django) that allowed management of quality system through a single portal. This included the management of documentation and training as well and direct control over project life-cycles and security of client's critical IP.

• Rollout of Subversion revision control for the management of business critical design process in CAD. This supported large binary objects necessary for multiple CAD systems (UGS NX and SolidWorks) and implemented simple revision control processes for engineers.

• Customised build of revision control client for businesses core CAD services such that only the necessary functions were available to engineers, hiding much of the complexities of advanced revision control. This included the integration of revision control information from the repository to proprietary binary formats during exports and management of released information to the client and vendors.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Deliver OpenSource solutions to the SME sector and change the engagement of technology from consumption to creation.

• Manage and deliver critical business development projects for Argus Systems Inc. after UK subsidiary became insolvent. This included significant proof-of-concept for global CA infrastructure (Marconi) and on-going projects with key vendors (IBM, Sun, RSA, ComputaCentre).

• Develop and maintain infrastructure to support development of integrated business solutions over extended IPv4/IPv6 extra-net.

• Customize and maintain secured, distributed small business services for networking, email, file storage, backup and encryption (this included deployment and management of root CA through our own developed OpenSSL management scripts).

ACHIEVEMENTS

• Innumerate process and business improvements in-line with the more recent integration works at OSTC. These involved a long list of technologies from basic networking (IPv4/IPv6) and telephony (SIP) through to custom office integration (OpenOffice/Java) and desktop utilities (Java/EclipseSWT) that deeply integrated with the client's business operations, delivering unimagined efficiencies and value.

• Developed stable USB backed data-backup solution for numerous, geographically distributed clients over dial-up and broadband whilst ensuring confidentiality, integrity and security of information.

• Design and development of “intraweave”, an OpenBSD based thin-server for client integration over the private extra-net; supporting seamless delivery of network services, email, data, printing and other, customised, office services.

• Customised, packaged and maintained cross-platform OSS toolkit of communication clients, software and utilities for client's to smoothly integrate into the business services from home PCs or other remote locations.

• Deployment of network storage cluster to support automated client backup and services through the extra-net. Integration of these services with third-party services to ensure availability, integrity and redundancy.

• Developed business with Outsource Technical Concepts such that they wanted me as full-time component of their business.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Delivered military grade secure operating systems to government bodies and tier 1 telecoms, banking, insurance clients.

• Managed and supported the implementation of all major enterprise integration projects with the UK, Ireland and the Middle East.

• Personally support critical projects through detailed operational inspection using system call tracing and application profiling. This supported the lockdown of applications within the trusted operating system environment and ensured 100% binary compatibility to the standard platform operation.

• Produced dozens of configuration and installation packages for standard applications including Apache web servers, numerous FTP servers, various email servers all of which were specifically designed to integrate with native packaging systems so that trusted security policies could be set during deployment. This required extensive Perl scripting including the development of Policy modules to allow for static definition and alteration of policies (generally within the scripts) as well as XS module to allow calling privileged Argus Security functions during setup.

ACHIEVEMENTS

• 200% increase in installed base and development of strategic partnerships with Delloitte ERS and ComputaCentre.

• Lock-down and configuration of custom, J2EE, VPN billing system on Pitbull (Solaris 2.6). Assisted in architectural reviews to eliminate batch processing model with security features available on the trusted operating system platform to allow direct processing.

• System analysis and penetration profiling for lock-down of a global root certificate authority on Pitbull (Solaris 2.8). This required complex configuration and installation scripting (shell and perl) of component pieces within an assured environment and included the facilities required for redundancy and re-location of services to new sites.

• Capitalised on the opportunity presented during insolvency of the UK subsidiary to continue working with key projects and partners with UK and support other European operations through consultancy.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Development of knowledge strategy within the call centre to ensure that known issues and common misdiagnoses were captured and fed back through support tiers thus reducing the full life-cycle support cost of each product.

• Planning, development and roll-out of $2.3M knowledge management system to support 150 products in 5 languages (EFIGS) in order to reduce escalations by 30% year-on-year. Forecast development for a roll-out to internet and direct client support.

• Install and configuration of front-end (ColdFusion) and back-end (Oracle 8i on Solaris 2.8) development systems; liaise with EDS for management and upgrade of production system; including configuration, monitoring, performance tuning and upgrade planning for database systems.

• Interface with senior management to assure the viability of project and build bridges with concurrent development of a $30M knowledge system based in the Americas.

ACHIEVEMENTS

• Engaged with SAP team during roll-out of new call handling system and re-structured the all handling codes for complete EMEA support tiers (call centres, localization centres and service centres).

• Management of mercurial team of permanent, temporary and ad-hoc (borrowed from front-line support) resources to build coherent knowledge base for diverse product range in all the required languages.

• Development of custom database extensions and structure to handle inadequacies in the RightNow knowledge system.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Timely replication, resolution and (where necessary) escalation of serious product compatibility problems to the product development teams.

• Guidance of call-centre agents to reduce repeated escalation of known issues.

• Set-up and maintenance of replication laboratory for all supported systems and printers. We made extensive use of Norton GHOST as well as multi-boot partitions and network storage (Novell directory) to allow expedient replication of any client set-up.

ACHIEVEMENTS

• Consistently fastest and most successful support engineer in the support centre.

• Often travelled on-site to deal with critical client issues (although this was expressly outside of our remit).

• Go-to engineer for all PostScript, PCL, Networking, Unix or Novell issues.

• Promoted to Knowledge support manager.

Call Centre Agent (...)

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