James Whitt Email & Phone Number

Cincinnati, Ohio, United States

Responsible for managing the Cloud and DevOps professional services team delivering exceptional solutions to customers. Drives creating processes, aligning teams, and initiatives for defining and building new innovated products. Taking an Agile and DevOps approach to manage teams, vendors, and off shore resources to deliver both to customers and internal projects.

Cincinnati, Ohio Area

- Tracked new trends and technologies in the industry to stay on the cutting edge of customer solutions.- Provided regular updates to project owners, VPs, and the executive level on status of existing product and projects, along with upcoming projects and high priority backlog items.- Managed and forecasted a budget of over $28 million that covered labor costs, customer equipment purchases, vendor licensing, new initiative development costs, and employee development.… Show more - Tracked new trends and technologies in the industry to stay on the cutting edge of customer solutions.- Provided regular updates to project owners, VPs, and the executive level on status of existing product and projects, along with upcoming projects and high priority backlog items.- Managed and forecasted a budget of over $28 million that covered labor costs, customer equipment purchases, vendor licensing, new initiative development costs, and employee development. Coordinated monthly vs. actual budget review meetings with senior level, finance, product owners, and supply chain.- Responsible for the product lifecycle, strategic direction, technology roadmaps, and execution of consumer hardware and software solutions.- Guided new service offerings through the full product lifecycle from inception, requirement gathering, architecture, build, training, and deployment; Led multiple teams in different departments to reach the end goal.- Developed and cultivated relationships across all areas and levels of the company to develop new solutions and update existing equipment and software. Worked between departments to identify highest priority projects to benefit the company and customers. - Built a vendor management system for product development that allowed for tracking progress, milestones, features, bugs, and budgets. The system then allowed for capturing performance metrics to hold vendors accountable to SLAs and improve on future deliverables.- Conducted quarterly vendor reviews to address issues and explore new opportunities to improve customer experience and reliability. Worked with vendors on continuous process improvements.- Hired and managed a team of engineers, architects, and project managers. Worked closely with individuals to build career plans, determine training needs, and provide monthly one on one performance reviews and yearly corporate reviews. Collaborated with indirect report’s managers on performance on projects. Show less

- Introduced the Agile methodologies to the software engineering group and business units. Re-organized and trained the development group into two teams utilizing Scrum and one team utilizing Kanban to meet the different business units needs. Worked with business units on the transition from a Waterfall “all at once” approach to an Agile approach, while identifying product owners and working closely to build use cases and groom the product backlog.- Implemented a feature / bug backlog… Show more - Introduced the Agile methodologies to the software engineering group and business units. Re-organized and trained the development group into two teams utilizing Scrum and one team utilizing Kanban to meet the different business units needs. Worked with business units on the transition from a Waterfall “all at once” approach to an Agile approach, while identifying product owners and working closely to build use cases and groom the product backlog.- Implemented a feature / bug backlog management, project tracking, and task management system based upon Jira and Confluence. This allowed for accurate budget and resource management, increased project tracking, and improved the cost analysis of ongoing projects.- Enacted a continuous integration and continuous delivery process using the Test Driven Development (TTD) approach that utilized Jenkins, Maven, Ivy, Git, Apache Ant, and JUnit. This also included transforming from a manual code push to an automated solution with RPMs that were generated as part of the build process.- Led the architecture and design of the ServiceNow implementation which covered Change, Incident, Problem, and Configuration Items.- Participate in code reviews, bug fixes, and new feature implementation- Evaluate new technologies for potential use for cloud product for enterprise customers. This included the designed and architecture an automated bare-metal provisioning system that allowed for remote installation of OS’s utilizing PXE Booting and allowing for re-installation of OS without the need to be on location. The project utilized OpenComputer, Puppet, Foreman, OpenStack, and vSphere.- Hired and managed multiple teams of developers that were geographically dispersed and consisted of both employees and contractors. Worked closely with individuals to build career plans, determine training needs, and provide monthly one on one performance reviews and yearly corporate reviews. Show less

- Participated in the development of an enterprise public / private cloud product that utilized VMWare vSphere, SQL Server, Apache, PHP, Tomcat, and Java. This included workflow optimization and building WEB services for 3rd party consumption.- Worked closely with Sun Microsystems, sales, and customers to design and implement solutions based upon Solaris Containers virtualization technology.- Supported customers subscribing to Managed Services in the Unix, Linux, and Backup… Show more - Participated in the development of an enterprise public / private cloud product that utilized VMWare vSphere, SQL Server, Apache, PHP, Tomcat, and Java. This included workflow optimization and building WEB services for 3rd party consumption.- Worked closely with Sun Microsystems, sales, and customers to design and implement solutions based upon Solaris Containers virtualization technology.- Supported customers subscribing to Managed Services in the Unix, Linux, and Backup domains.- Researched, designed, and implemented multiple support systems which include a MySQL Multi Master Replication server for HA database needs, and a centralized logging server that automatically files all customers devices that utilized RHEL and Syslog-ng- Administered customer and internal UNIX servers: RHEL, Gentoo, Solaris 8/9/10, and FreeBSD. Planned, tested, and implemented a full migration from EMC to Netapp SAN storage on all machines.- Developed systems for integrating third party software to a customer reporting portal, the internal invoice system, the Service Desk ticketing system, and the EM7 alerting system.- Architected and implemented a customer power billing system to gather metrics from multiple data centers and utilize big data to process the vast amount of data points. Project included all architecture and design phases and involved automation, database design, and website UX.- Designed and developed web services that utilized the REST protocol for handling 3rd party communication. Worked closely with customers on utilizing web services. Show less

- Designed and implemented a system for data warehousing data center environmental readings, automated report generation for customers, and a web portal for real time viewing.- Integrated IBM Tivoli Storage Manager into customer billing system utilizing a MySQL database for data warehousing and Perl for generating the bills and sending them to a FTP server.

- Built and installed two production level FreeBSD (UNIX) servers that provided mail and web services that serviced over 15,000 domains- Maintained five FreeBSD (UNIX) production servers- Developed network clients to communicate with remote registry servers using EPP and RRP protocols- Developed and implemented a shopping cart that used libraries from existing projects which allowed services to be added to different systems without user intervention- Programmed… Show more - Built and installed two production level FreeBSD (UNIX) servers that provided mail and web services that serviced over 15,000 domains- Maintained five FreeBSD (UNIX) production servers- Developed network clients to communicate with remote registry servers using EPP and RRP protocols- Developed and implemented a shopping cart that used libraries from existing projects which allowed services to be added to different systems without user intervention- Programmed database driven websites that provided commerce solutions and informational services that each received over 500,000 visits/month.- Overhauled MySQL database structures and statements to increase efficiency and reduce load on the MySQL server- Designed a new email system and overhauled the old mail system with a 30% server load decrease while still implementing new spam and virus checking features- Developed a target marketing site that utilized web services to present third party data to the user Show less

- Tested new Bluetooth protocols on the network simulator (ns-2) with the bluehoc modification installed- Researched and debugged new Bluetooth technology alongside graduate students that were written in C