Partner and founding member of the studio.

I served as lead system administrator for acceSS7, one of the primary tools for monitoring the SS7 network. SS7 messages are fundamental to the set up of phone calls in a digital network, and control all aspects of communication between switches. The HP/Agilent acceSS7 distributed platform consists of thousands of geographically diverse pieces of hardware, across more than a dozen megaswitch sites that represented the core of the signaling network. Live taps of the individual SS7 links are muxed, pushed to blade based card cages for processing, and then up to site servers. There was a central server that collected from the sites, and application servers for client/server interaction through a suite of applications. I was responsible for the entirety of the system from start to finish, whether it was HP-UX system administration, directing switch site personnel in troubleshooting and repair operations, support vendor oversight and management, and user support to all users of multiple 24/7 call centers. I inherited the system in very poor condition with over a thousand existing issues, and a very small subset of other workers that could actually use the system as intended. The platform had already existed for 5 years at that time, and given the $120M initial investment coupled with a $2M yearly support contract, the ROI was terrible and my main focus for improvement. I spent 2.5 years correcting all issues that existed prior, hired and trained an administration team of 4, developed training courses for the system, and trained 150+ users between 2 24/7 call centers.