Luke Thornton Email & Phone Number

London, London, Gb

NewDay are a leading consumer finance and technology company, with over 5 million customers and receivables of over £4.5billion. They operate multiple direct-to-consumer products through well known brands such as Aqua, Marbles, Fluid and Bip, and in the merchant offering sector, they partner with several well established retailers, including John Lewis & Partners, Argos & AO.com. 1 in 5 credit cards issued in UK in 2022 were issued by NewDayResponsible for a budget of £30+ million and a team of 50+ covering IT Infrastructure and Operations.Responsible areas include: Cloud Services (Azure/AWS) | Servers & Storage | Network/Network Security | Databases | Application Support (Azure hosted/SaaS) | Finance/HR Systems Support | Middleware (IBM Sterling/MQ) | Service Desk | Desktop Engineering/M365 | Unified Communications | Technical Change | Service Improvement | Problem ManagementProjects:• Led the migration of all Infrastructure services from on-premise/colocation to public cloud (Azure) within 12 months• Successfully transitioned all legacy on-premise Citrix environments to Citrix Cloud – providing a seamless transition and improved user experience for 1000+ users• Replaced legacy networking with a SASE solution using hybrid SD-WAN alongside Zscaler ZIA/ZPA, improving network scalability, performance and availability while reducing costs by over 50%

Berlin, De

Deutsche Bahn are the second-largest transport company in the world, and the largest railway operator and infrastructure owner in Europe. • Accountable for cloud and data centre Infrastructure supporting group companies such as CrossCountry Trains, Arriva UK, Arriva Netherlands, Arriva Denmark, DB Cargo UK, Euro Cargo Rail and Arriva Trains Wales.

Dallas, Texas, Us

AECOM are one of the worlds largest Architecture, Engineering and Construction companies with over 90,000 employees and £15 billion revenue.• Directly responsible for the delivery of all global virtualisation platforms and infrastructure• Multifaceted hands-on role managing the global virtualisation and EMEAI data centre teams• Accountable for over 7,000 servers across 1,900 sites and 150 countries, supported by a geographically dispersed global team• Management of and full responsibility for budgets, forecasting, staff and planning • Renegotiated >£1million contracts with key vendors such as Dell, Verizon, VMware and Citrix • Led integration teams following the largest ever AEC acquisition between URS (50,000 staff) and AECOM (45,000 staff)• Assisted with the consolidation of 8 Active Directory forests and 28 domains to facilitate the migration of 95,000 Exchange mailboxes to Office 365• Implemented company first follow-the-sun model to provide 24/7 technical support while reducing the need for on-call staff and out-of-hours work• Introduced VMware vSphere to remote sites as part of a £12million converged infrastructure refresh, providing improved availability, resource scheduling and monitoring• Reduced yearly Citrix maintenance by 30% through consolidation• Managed global £1M Skype implementation project deploying VMware vSphere infrastructure to data centres in AMER, EMEAI and APAC to support 100,000 users• Successfully implemented dedicated vSphere SQL clusters globally saving >£1million in licensing• Implemented a US hosted Citrix XenApp environment providing email and finance systems access to 500 external consultants in India, delivering savings of £5million by outsourcing key support functions

Dallas, Texas, Us

• Promoted to lead the data centre transformations following a number of large acquisitions• Technical lead and escalation point for all 3rd level issues relating to desktop/server virtualisation, data centre servers, enterprise storage, backups, high availability solutions and replication technologies• Led all data centre technology refreshes, upgrades, migrations and acquisitions including data centre in-sourcing• Technical lead for a >£2million project to transition from legacy in-house data centres to enterprise class tier 3 hosted facilities across EMEA• Provided data centre high availability and capacity to support 5-year growth plan in EMEA and set global standards for data centre facilities and DR capabilities• Led the enterprise server, virtualisation, storage and DR work streams through several large mergers and acquisitions, including the project planning and technical delivery of in-sourcing Fujitsu IT managed data centre to a tier 3 hosted data centre in London delivering £2million OPEX saving• Managed the implementation of fully automated data centre disaster recovery using Dell Compellent native storage replication managed by VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, improved business continuity by reducing key systems recovery time from days to minutes• Implemented a central tapeless backup solution (Commvault Simpana) dramatically improving key application recovery• Planned and delivered six-week project consolidating multiple VMware vSphere environments, including vSphere version upgrade and migration to new EMC storage platform, saving £100k in OPEX

Dallas, Texas, Us

• Promoted to manage the service delivery team within Europe • Led three year project to replace all European servers in first fully standardised and documented server technology stack; streamlined support across highly standardised platforms• Fully responsible for the early adoption of virtualisation technology converting over 70% of data centre servers in two years using VMware vSphere• Project managed the migration of European IT systems following the acquisition of 7,000 seat Earth Tech Engineering• Successfully programme managed the delivery of all IT related services for a number of large office relocations/mergers affecting 5,000+ staff• Leveraged industry leading software to develop internal automation processes and dramatically reduce deployment times for new hardware

Dallas, Texas, Us

• Regional Manager supporting several sites throughout the UK, assisted by a team of technicians and engineers• Provided IT consulting services to several engineering companies within the Yorkshire region• Project managed the successful migration of ageing Novell/Windows 95 systems on to Windows NT4• Introduced “five nines” availability for mission critical data using Windows 2003 failover clusters

London, Gb

Viby, Dk

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