Juan Bravo Email & Phone Number

Madrid, Community Of Madrid, Spain

Originally a hardware manufacturing company, ST Engineering iDirect started its migration into a Services organization in 2022 with the creation of the Global Services department and the Technical Operations (TechOps) team. For the first time in its history, the company started offering their customers, mainly ISPs and network operators, the opportunity to not only purchase the hardware but to also subscribe to Managed Services.In my position as Managed Services Team Leader I was tasked to build a new team and get it trained to be able to offer the new managed services offering. Within a year, I was effectively managing and leading a team of nine engineers that were providing managed services on top of our Dialog and Evolution hardware products. The services were delivered for customers subscribed to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), as well as over traditional CAPEX deals.I was responsible for developing a "Fixed Step Career" program for the team, identifying the training needs and finding the right internal and external courses and resources to deliver them within the available budget. A "Rewards and Recognitions" program was also started to increase motivation and morale, improve performance, enhance the company culture and retain talent within the team. Competency Management matrixes were introduced to assist tracking down the training needs and the knowledge gaps within the team.On top of that, I performed additional team management tasks such as SMART goal setting and reviewing, performance evaluation, hiring and coaching of new team members, etc. The job position required not only a highly skilled individual who could be actively engaged on customer escalations, but also a leader for the new born team to inspire it and lead it to success.Closely working with other groups with the organization, such as Customer Experience, Customer Success and Operation Support Systems (OSS) was a must on this role.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

After six years in the company and with more than eight years experience on the VSAT industry, I was a recognized Subject Matter Expert (SME) withing the organization on multiple topics, having developed and delivered multiple technical training courses to the support team members and management over the years. As the VSAT market expanded gradually, so was the demand to provide top notch service support to the ST Engineering iDirect customer base, so I joined the Technical Assistance Center (TAC) support organization to contribute to this effort.Initially starting as Senior Technical Services Engineer on the Tier-3 Support Team for the Evolution product, my main responsibilities were to attend and resolve customer escalations received from lower support tiers, providing internal training and mentoring the new hires on their first months onboard. With minimum supervision I was able to perform my duties exceeding the expectations and soon I was promoted to Senior II and then Principal Technical Services Engineer, where I played a major role proactively supporting our major key accounts in the European and Middle Eastern regions.As Technical Account Manager, I was expected not only to resolve major technical issues but to proactively interact with our strategic accounts in order to improve their user experience within the Evolution product line. For that purpose, Network Audits are performed on a yearly basis, not only to evaluate the current status of their networks but also to provide recommendations and guidelines that could be aligned with each customer interests. I also engaged other internal teams such as Product Line Management or Engineering as needed, with the clear scope of achieving a continuous improvement.While working for the support organization I mastered in the usage of tools such as Remedy, Bugzilla, Service Now, Salesforce, Jira or Confluence. I also had time to learn about technologies such as MikroTik, Velocity, Dialog, VMware, Python, etc.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

As a natural evolution of my role as Senior Technical Trainer, I started to take increasing responsibilities within the Technical Training team. Within my first year in the company, I volunteered to revamp and update all of the existing training courses to the recent Evolution iDX 3.2 software release, including the creation of a new "Delta" training course, which was a sound success. Following this accomplishment I was promoted to Senior Course Developer, where my responsibilities greatly changed, now mainly involving the development of a master training plan that included the creation of both on-class and e-learning training courses.During three years I was the only course developer in the company, being responsible not only for maintaining and updating the existing courseware to the latest Evolution software releases (such as "Evolution iOM", "Advanced iOM", "iQBC" and "BHI"), but also ensuring that new training courses were created to address new needs from our internal and external customers (such as "Evolution Layer-2 / Layer-3 Networking", "Evolution TRANSEC" and "SatHaul XE" training courses).Student books were compiled using Adobe FrameMaker 11 and MadCap Flare, and the eLearning content was created using the open-source platform Moodle 2.5. Microsoft PowerPoint presentations were also developed for the instructors to deliver the training courses, which included detailed notes aimed at ensuring a consistent user experience regardless of the instructor and location where the training was delivered. With this in mind, I was deeply involved on train-the-trainer sessions for every new course developed.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

iDirect, now part of ST Engineering group, was a leading company on the satellite-based IP global communications market, manufacturing satellite technology that provided broadband access solutions for telecommunications carriers, enterprise customers and military and government organizations. With a growing demand for specialized technical training courses to assist iDirect partners to design, deploy, operate and maintain their networks, during 2012 the iDirect Technical Training department was created to satisfy the customer demand.I started strong as a Technical Training Specialist, delivering my first training class by the end of my first month on the job, when majority of the new hires required almost a year to reach this stage. Within months I could deliver all the available training courses: Evolution iOM, Advanced iOM and iQBC. I delivered training courses in our offices located in Dubai, London, Washington, South-Africa and Singapore, but also on customer locations along North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East.In order to deliver the classes, an outstanding set of skills was required: Radio frequency and VSAT communications; Link Budget analysis; Layer-2 and Layer-3 Networking; Quality of Service (QoS) design; Linux server administration. And, of course, strong knowledge on the iDirect product and feature portfolios: Global NMS, ABS, A-TDMA, TRANSEC, Mesh, VNO/HNO, etc.On-class trainings consisted on Microsoft PowerPoint presentations along with whiteboard explanations. Technical software used during the classes included traffic generation tools (iperf, udpblast, multicast hammer), traffic capture and analysis tools (tcpdump, wireshark) running over Linux based systems (Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5, 6 and 7; and Raspbian). A virtualized setup was created for further testing and training delivery using VMware ESXi software. Also, common satellite communication tools were employed (spectrum analyzer, cable tester, etc).

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates government required a highly sophisticated communication interception and forensics solution to cover their cyber security needs, focused mainly on monitoring Internet, UMTS, GPRS and LTE traffic all along the country. This is where SS8 Networks products entered the game, allowing law enforcement agencies and intelligence services to conduct lawful interception and cyber monitoring of both circuit and packet-mode communications, extract related metadata, accurately reconstruct all targeted voice and data communications (e.g. telephone calls, emails, chat sessions, web surfing, etc.) and provide comprehensive analysis of communications patterns – all in accordance with local laws and standards.Even being the biggest international project for the company, the size of the team based in Dubai was still quite small, so my functions involved not only the project management level but also quality assurance, logistics, and of course the technical side of it, including design, installation and support tasks. Good organizational and time management skills were a must, as we had to work not only during the daytime but also on the nighttime, when our headquarters in California started operating.Meetings with the law enforcement agencies were arranged to discuss their new needs and accommodate them within the deployed architecture. Presentations showing the solution status, accomplishment tasks, future trends and services were performed to ensure the overall happiness of the end-user.Dealing with the country main ISP (Etisalat) at both management and technical level, was also part of my duties, as our servers were partially installed over the carrier network. We had to deal with Sandvine, Cisco & Juniper devices in order to be able to smoothly accommodate our needs within the pre-existing network infrastructure.

Madrid, Spain

The Spanish Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs needed to deploy a secure network to link the most critical Spanish Embassies worldwide, assuring two-ways encrypted & secured communication between the Government and its ambassadors and Information Department agents located all around the world.The job involved the analysis, design, deployment, testing, maintenance and support (tier-2) of a global scale satellite network, which was implemented over X-Band VSAT links. The solution covered not only the satellite segment system but also the ground station along with a Linux based Network Operation Centre (NOC).The links were established using two military geostationary satellites (XTAR 29E and SPAINSAT 30W) along with U.S. iDirect modulation/demodulation equipment. DVB-S2 TDM carriers were used for outbound information and multiple TDMA carriers were configured for the inbound direction, creating an IP network over satellite.A set of Cisco routers (2901 and 3945 series) and switches (Catalyst 2960 and Catalyst 4500 series) were employed as the pure core of the IP infrastructure, along with redundant Windows and Linux servers running server-side user applications. All the devices were configured to maximize bandwidth efficiency and minimize latency, having in mind VoIP and other RTP jitter sensitive applications.The network operated mainly real-time applications as VoIP or Videoconference (H.323, SIP, RTP standards) but also a complete set of standard office applications as email (POP3, SMTP, IMAP), web surfing (HTTP, HTTPS), file sharing (FTP), among others. Linux daemons were in charge of monitoring network throughput and link availability, with continuous weekly and monthly reports of the complete IT infrastructure being elaborated. Network troubleshooting was one of the big challenges after deploying the remote stations worldwide, with networking tools as iperf or wireshark being widely used.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade (ICEX) is an institution whose main target is the creation of commercial agreements and transactions between Spanish and foreign companies. With a network composed by more than one hundred Commercial Offices around most of the world capitals, sharing information among them and with their main office located in Madrid is critical for they daily operation. This is achieved through a complex network system that works combining dedicated lines, ISDN access and Virtual Private Network links over standard Internet connections.The job involved the design, deployment, maintenance and support (tier-1) of the new information system of the Commercial Office of the Embassy of Spain in Malaysia, including duties such as the installation of a new server room and the purchase, installation, configuration, setup and maintenance of the whole new IT structure, Microsoft based: Windows 2003 Server, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Microsoft Office, etc. Oracle databases were also configured and managed.The Embassy of Spain IT system consisted of Cisco routers (1900 Series) and switches (Catalyst 2800 Series) along with Nortel Network VPN devices (Contivity Series) and a Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3) software-based load balancer to route the traffic between multiple links (ISDN, DSL). This server also acted as a software-based firewall. Zyxel digital PBX (X2002 series) and VoIP devices were introduced during year 2008 with great success. The complete network included more than 74 offices worldwide connected using VPN links.In spite of the technical profile of this job, I was also involved in the coordination of ICT events, including duties such as the selection of targets, the creation of guests’ lists, or the analysis of the feedback given by the guests. Such work was intended to promote commercial agreements between Spanish & Malaysian companies.

Malaga, Spain

During the late 1990s a new generation of medical imaging devices started replacing the legacy photographic film based equipment, adding support for digital media. Following the guidelines of the widely accepted standard DICOM, hospitals and healthcare services worldwide started demanding solutions for medical picture archiving and communications systems (PACS). The lack of affordable products and solutions in the Spanish market lead the Department of Research and Development of TEDIAL to initiate a new project aimed to provide an inexpensive solution focused on the specific needs of the local customers. The job involved the analysis, research, design, development, testing and maintenance of an integrated solution for the management of inter-hospital digital-medical images lifecycle, verifying the industry standard DICOM. The solution included high performance servers running applications coded in C/C++ under Linux OS (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3) and Oracle Database (10g), massive storage capabilities achieved using robotic tape libraries (ADIC StorNext) and user-friendly information access through web services and web interfaces.It was necessary to completely develop the client/server architecture, using only the DICOM protocol standard official reference. Wireshark and other IP packet sniffing software were widely employed to trace and analyze the compliance with the DICOM standard, verifying the integration of the developed PACS with state of the art medical equipment.

Masters Degree In Communication And Information System Management, (Mdsic)

Bachelors Degree In Telecommunication Systems Engineering, Major In Electronics