Expert Details
IT and Technology for the Online Gaming, Telecommunications and eCommerce Sectors
ID: 728415
United Kingdom
Expert's key achievements include:
• Turned around an underperforming IT division, with a budget of £36m and 125 strong, into one that drove the business, allowing profits to increase by almost 40% in 12 months.
• Part of the senior management team who directed through a period of huge business change, as more than 80% of the group revenue vanished over night.
• Tactically outsourced parts of software development & testing to Belgrade and India, whilst simultaneously implementing Agile development (Scrum).
• Improved scalability and uptime from 95% to 99.99% for the web sites, resulting in increased profits, customer retention and improved organisational reputation.
• Achieved a reputation for the delivery of creative solutions to critical business challenges across all areas, from sales & marketing through to corporate finance and HR.
• Implemented automatic trading technology encountered in Investment Banking, to solve a resource challenge within Trading at an Online Gaming organisation.
He conducted due diligence on two software companies for a group of Russian Oligarchs.He used his connections to get legal and taxation advice for a startup companies from two Big Four companies.He helped a startup set up an offshore call centre & fraud team in Latvia
Education
| Year | Degree | Subject | Institution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year: 1992 | Degree: B.Eng Hons | Subject: Electronic Systems Engineering | Institution: University of Essex |
Work History
| Years | Employer | Title | Department |
|---|---|---|---|
| Years: 2008 to Present | Employer: Undisclosed | Title: Managing Consultant | Department: |
Responsibilities:Founded in 1997, Network Knowledge is a specialist IT management consultancy. It specialises in the Ecommerce, Telecommunications and Online Gaming sectors with clients that operate on a global basis. It provides a full range of services from IT infrastructure and Service Delivery through to Project Management and Software Development.•Completed due diligence on two software houses (one in the UK and the other in the US) •Provided the infrastructure design, capacity planning and overall software architecture for a $25m online poker platform in Eastern Europe •Provided data centre and infrastructure consulting for a $6m TV Roulette platform •Delivered project management plans, overall architecture and a number of key supplier relationships, for a Russian Ecommerce web site with payment processors, a fraud solution, email & campaign management, data warehouse etc •Recruited the CTO and set up Customer Services in Latvia for a Russian client •Implemented SAP Business One as the finance and management reporting tool for a client. |
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| Years | Employer | Title | Department |
| Years: 2005 to 2008 | Employer: Sportingbet PLC | Title: IT Director (EMEA) promoted to CTO | Department: c-suite |
Responsibilities:Founded in 1998, Sportingbet Plc is amongst the pioneers of Online Gaming. Today, it is a quoted company with over £1.4bn of revenue and operates in 30 countries worldwide.CTO •Worked with the Board to deliver global solutions against a backdrop of huge business changes. •Responsible for a global budget of £36m (Capex & Opex) and a staff of 75 with a further 50 outsourced in Belgrade and Bangalore. •Provided guidance on the technological and commercial impact of several business projects: - Sale of the US business to Jazette and the subsequent technology & people splits, - Offshoring of Customer Services and Fraud departments to Dublin, followed by the rest of the organization (and production systems) to Guernsey - The amalgamating of Boss and Paradise Poker (at a technological & commercial level, including the subsequent disposal of Mindspan Technologies). •Implemented Agile methodology (Scrum) into Software Development & Testing and scaled up the internal teams from 14 to 60, with a further 50 outsourced offshore to Belgrade and India. IT Director (EMEA) •Took an existing poorly performing IT function and turned it around, by increasing scalability and improving web site availability from 95% to 99.99%. •Responsible for a budget of £12m (Capex & Opex) and a staff of 50 with a further 10 outsourced in Belgrade. •Restructured the whole IT function into 5 distinct areas – Projects, Operations, Infrastructure, Internal Development and Outsourced Development. Each area had a Head, promoted internally or sourced externally, who was responsible for managing their teams and delivering on the ‘get-well plans’ to turn around and scale their areas. •Production capacity was scaled up from 4,500 bets per hour to over 21,000 on Grand National 2006 and from 12,000 bets per day to 190,000. Ongoing, the Tuning Group made up of representatives from all of the IT teams and 3rd parties, optimized and tuned the systems. By Grand National 2007, the daily bet capacity has been increased to 320,000 bets per day. |
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| Years | Employer | Title | Department |
| Years: 2004 to 2005 | Employer: Lastminute Plc | Title: Head Of Production Promoted To Head Of Systems | Department: Tech |
Responsibilities:Lastminute, one of the best known online travel & leisure successes, was started in 1998 by Brent Hoberman & Martha Lane-Fox. It attracts over 2.5m visitors every week to its pan European web sites.Head of Systems •Improved and automated the service provided across the Lastminute.com group including its 8 subsidiaries (AllHotels, HolidayAutos, TravelSelect, TravelStore, HolidaysandMore, First Options, MedHotels and OTC). Synergies had been gained as Head of Production and the objective was to transfer these benefits to the rest of the business. •Responsible for 4 departments – Server Support, Systems Engineering, Data Centre and Network & Security. – 50 staff in total, 15 in the UK and remainder offshore. •Used remit as a troubleshooter to move freely across the whole of IT and the business, resolving problems, instituting pragmatic processes where necessary and using influencing & communication skills to bring about change in areas where I had no direct authority. Head of Production •Head hunted by the Lastminute CTO, ex MD of Credit Suisse First Boston, who needed an experienced troubleshooter to improve IT efficiency whilst remaining within budget targets. •Responsible for the restructuring of the Technical Operations and Database Administration teams, this consisted of 30 staff within the UK with a further 45 outsourced offshore. A restructure enabled the teams to work more efficiently and effectively. Noticeable improvements were made within a 5 month period rather than the 2 years originally predicted. |
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| Years | Employer | Title | Department |
| Years: 2001 to 2004 | Employer: Credit Suisse First Boston | Title: VP EMEA Operations CaST | Department: GNS |
Responsibilities:Credit Suisse First Boston is the investment banking arm of the Swiss based Credit Suisse Group. The Group has revenues in excess of $78.2bn and $1.2trillion of assets under management. In 2006, the Credit Suisse First Boston name was retired so that Credit Suisse brand could be used for all services.•Locally responsible for 24 people on a follow-the-sun basis with dotted line responsibility to nearly 50 globally. •Operationally responsible for all aspects of both centralized and distributed networked Internet facing & 3rd part connections, across 14 sites and nearly 500 exchanges globally. These included Ecommerce, VPN and Trading infrastructures which passed over 88Gb of data daily. |
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| Years | Employer | Title | Department |
| Years: 1999 to 2001 | Employer: Level(3) Communications | Title: IT Consultant | Department: IT |
Responsibilities:Level(3) Communications operates one of the largest communications and Internet backbones in the world. It covers all of the U.S. and most of Europe with its primary focus being the sale of large bandwidth connections to telecom carriers & ISPs etc. Its backbone carries over 5.1 petabytes daily.•Designer and chief architect for a global data fault management implementation, including disaster recovery. In order to reduce costs, the system was extended to include all servers. This project took 12 months to implement and cost over $2 million, using HP OpenView VantagePoint, which had to be partly rewritten to support the all of the servers. Once implemented, the system was receiving over 300,000 alerts every day and looked at by a team of 20 NOC engineers globally. |
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| Years | Employer | Title | Department |
| Years: 1996 to 1999 | Employer: CSC Computer Sciences Corporation | Title: Data Communications Analyst promoted to Technical Consultant | Department: BhS & Autoglass accounts |
Responsibilities:CSC is a leading global consulting, systems integration and outsourcing company with revenues in excess of $16.5bn. It has 90,000 employees in 80 countries worldwide and counts some of the biggest names in the world amongst its client list, ranging from NASA to the NHS.Technical Consultant •Installed and administered a 15000+ nodes LAN and WAN HP OpenView system, running on an HP 9000 node using HP-UX v.10.20 and Solaris 2.6, using an Oracle 7.3.4 database. •Responsible for planning several major sections of a new BhS Head Office and moved the entire Autoglass Head Office (3 satellite buildings into a central HQ). Data Communications Analyst •Responsible for the management of a 2000+ node WAN (using DEC VAXs, VMS and Ingres) and a 1000+ node LAN for a client, using Sun Sparcs, Solaris and Informix. |
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Career Accomplishments
| Associations / Societies |
|---|
| Senior Member of IEEE, Member and Chartered Engineer of IET (formerly the IEE), Member of BCS |
| Licenses / Certifications |
|---|
| CISSP |
Additional Experience
| Vendor Selection |
|---|
| Expert has reviewed and selected outsourced software & IT infrastructure suppliers from India, Argentina, Canada, Belarus, Ukraine & Lativa and also operated a near-shoring model. |
| Marketing Experience |
|---|
| Expert has considerable industry insight into online gaming and is regularly consulted by some of the major players in that sector. |
| Other Relevant Experience |
|---|
| Expert is a specialist in turning around under performing IT divisions |
Fields of Expertise
information technology, information technology management, online gambling, online gaming, cloud computing, backend technology, financial management, executive management, business, information security, business startup, globalization, ecommerce, entrepreneurship, business operations, Internet infrastructure, Internet service provider, Web development, Internet commerce, World Wide Web programming, World Wide Web application, business management, World Wide Web software, Internet firewall, marketing software, client/server computing, information delivery, computer system administration, computer networking, information storage and retrieval, software system development, application software, management, configuration management, encryption, communication, Internet, operations, information storage, technology, computer technology, operations management, computer software, computer network