Bruce Robbins Email and Phone Number

• Provided strategic technical and business leadership on a number of £3M+ projects.• Designed and implementing platforms with high transactional processing (£1Billion p.a.).• Enabling significant cost savings (e.g. circa £1.2M), performance improvements (e.g. x35) and • reducing manual processes (e.g. 90%).(Semiotica New Media was formed out of Semiotica in 2000 with 4 other software engineers, 40% was sold to the owners of de Poel to form ‘de Poel Semiotica’ which was fully merged into the parent group in 2008. Semiotica Ltd was re-formed in 2009 to provide consultancy services.)

Lucky Bin is a partnership that has has owned racehorses and since 2010 has had 14 winners and 37 places. Trained by both Kim Bailey in Cheltenham and Donald McCain in Cholmondeley, Cheshire.Amongst our horses are Supreme Present (pictured winning with AP McCoy up). Before retiring to stud she achieved a handicap hurdle rating of 146, making her the 6th top rated mare for that season. The first foal we have bred from her is a colt by Kayf Tara (born 2016) who was sold at the Derby Sale in November 2016 for 44000 euros. Amongst the foals we bred from our first mare Malindi Bay, was a nice colt foal by Schiaparelli. This foal went on to win a show class at the Derby Sale before being successfully offered in the ring.

XCiPi: is a project completed for a global data centre operator to create a cloud based data aware product, providing intelligent data via a consumer level ‘mobile first’ interface. The discovery phase involved data backed product design: • 25 hrs of in depth workshops, involving 50 subjects across subject areas, • Remote global interviews, • One on one interviews with senior and board level management.The feasibility phase comprised: • Running small teams of back and front end engineers, • Full product life cycle, • Creation of proof of concept and prototypes and users testing, • Infrastructure, production and deployment. The technology utilises: • Distributed architecture and storage, • Advanced search technologies, • noSql and graph data stores, • Advanced visualisations, • Machine learning, natural language interfaces and AI. The architectural design leverages: • Micro services, • Dev Ops and containerisation.

TalentBacker is a crowd funding platform providing support for talent. I was one of 5 founding directors. The Talentbacker brand and portfolio has been acquired by PledgeSports http://www.pledgesports.orgTalent Backer is one of those start ups which I feel proud to have been associated with. We helped a number of very talented sportsmen and women achieve their ambition, (including gold medals) and enabled them to compete at the top level. Aside from sports talents we assisted writers and other creative individuals and groups to make their mark in their respective fields.As a crowdfunding platform TalentBacker was a good example of a lean startup, founded with vision and a MVP (minimum viable product), it was a leader in an emerging field.

I was closely connected with dePoel for over 11 years, first as a supplier then as a partner company and then as a board director. After serving 5 months beyond the agreed lock in period I continued to provide consultancy and explore further commercial opportunities for the supply of resource management solutions into new markets. Key achievements: successful strategic and operational system planning and implementation, from high level overview to detailed specification, requirements, procurement and vendor assessment. £2m+ project.

de Poel is a technology led business, the leading UK Managed Service Provider and the largest supplier of temporary labour in the UK, outside of the public sector.• Ran the design and build of all in house platforms during the period when the company grew from an EBIT of £200k (on sales of £30m) to £14m (on sales of £750m).• Delivered a transition from external to in-house systems processing millions of transactions achieving high availability (99.999%). • Used multithreaded processing and in memory databases to deliver consolidated invoices in a sub 5 min window as opposed the legacy 2hr+. • Reduced non conforming invoices, from an average of 9.5% to under .2%, • Reduced invoice support processing from 35hrs p.w. to under 3 minutes.• Blended financial and transactional data inputs from disparate applications and integrating outputs into varied client systems including: SAP, Oracle and Infosys; resolving data silos and providing real time reporting and Business Intelligence.• Formed a strategic technology policy and led a technical transformation programme covering multiple platforms, managing teams of 35 to 100+ engineers.• Managed change and risk during migration of the user base across legacy systems, incorporating governance, contingency planning and failover processes.• Built lean and agile processes delivering business value through continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous incremental improvement.• Led a £6M transformational program to reposition internal to Cloud infrastructure.

The two principle shareholders of dePoel and the three principle shareholders of Semiotica formed this business to produce software solutions to both dePoel and external clients. Prior to this Semiotica had created a number of enterprise level, data driven, on-line applications serving: recruitment, compliance and logistics sectors. The rebuild of eTips and other de Poel applications was becoming the main focus of work leading to the formal merging of the software business, into de Poel, as an in house department.Key achievements during this period were: overcoming the problems of rapidly growing data bases through distribution, partitioning , replication and sharding. Providing high performance, high availability online applications with uptime's of 99.999. Producing an application that reduced non conforming invoices from an average of 10% to under .2% and provided other cost saving.

Formed with 4 highly talented software engineers. Development of multimedia and web applications. Produced software applications for highly regulated industries and developed techniques to enforce compliance and prevent repudiation of data. The newly formed de Poel became a valued customer and like all good relationships this lead to producing some outstanding software, including a bespoke data integration and back office billing application, a compliance data application and a subcontractor management system. The rebuild from the ground up of their invoice and timesheet processing system brought the two companies so close that the steps towards the end merger became inevitable. The phenomenal success of the de Poel product had lead to very high numbers of real time transactions during this period. This required a new application to manage the growing sophistication of the resource management business. To meet the challenges that came with rapid growth, provide the levels of speed, accuracy and visibility we architected and built a new version of eTips from the ground up.Key achievements during this period were: Developing stand alone financial systems to eliminate hours of manual process and deliver new standards of accuracy, reducing invoice support processing from 35hrs to 3 minutes as well as integrating financial and transactional data across the disparate and varied systems of a large number of clients, negating the Silo effect.

This was a commercial enterprise founded on a partnership between Manchester University and a number of VC's, set up as an early technology incubator.

I worked privately and through intermediate companies to assist businesses incorporate new technologies into their processes. This covered three main areas which were the result of digital technology or transformed by it: film and video, multi media and print origination. Developments in hardware and software were making a significant impact in these industries. Hardware installation often required customisation of the software. Once installed deep training on the systems was essential. During this time I trained subject matter experts on both the new hardware and software, mainly working directly for the suppliers of the solutions. These suppliers included; Kodak, duPont, Hell Linotype, Apple, Sun, Silicon Graphics and other major brands. Direct clients that I provided training to included: in the production sectors: TetraPak. Kellogs, Nestle, BBC; in the services sectors: Anderson, KMPG, Barclays; in life sciences: Astra Zenica, Sandoz; engineering: Vickers, BAE and also across the public sectors: HM Police, HM Revenue and local authorities.