Mark Howard Email & Phone Number

Urbandale, Iowa, Us

IP Pathways, Leading the Data Center Revolution™, provides solutions that reduce complexity within your IT infrastructure by reducing your data center footprint, consolidating data storage and management, simplifying virtualization, and optimizing application performance and security. Our goal is to have happy customers, happy manufacturer partners and happy employees. Our strategy is to customize internal and hybrid cloud solutions to allow you to leverage your existing investments while increasing utilization of human capital and equipment. We live in the data center and specialize in the following areas of the IT environment: Data Storage, Server & Desktop Virtualization, Core Networking, Servers & Unified Computing Systems and Application Performance & Security.

Omaha, Ne, Us

Top 10 Connected Health Care Organization with 10.5K employeesProvided strategic leadership and operational management over IT infrastructure. Managed a team of 28 highly skilled individuals and a budget of $5MM. Drove strategy of technology acquisitions and integration required to support and maintain over 600 applications including Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. Scope included vendor management, risk management, ITIL delivery best practices, and capital expenditures.• Infused strategic and purposeful approach to capital purchases allowing capture of significant vendor discounts.• Sponsored and drove development of LEED Gold Certified Midlands Data Center.• Led numerous upgrades to emerging technologies and application enhancements including data center practices, network (data and voice), server / desktop virtualization and storage technologies.• Designed, implemented and managed active – active data center technologies which delivered five “9’s” uptime.• Consolidated 5 data centers, virtualized 70% of the 1200 server environment and consolidated 3.4PB of storage saving capital and maintenance expense dollars. • Successfully implemented Epic EHR application and infrastructure to support 11 local area hospitals and 100+ clinics.• Facilitated implementation of WIFI coverage for 2MM square feet of hospital and clinic space.• Led design and execution of Omaha metropolitan area dark fiber network saving $11MM with an ROI of 3 years.• Designed new disaster recovery plans, processes and tools that protected enterprise assets.• Transitioned infrastructure team responsibilities to outsourcing partner while continuing to deliver projects and daily work activity in this fast paced environment on a timely basis with limited resources.

Foothill Ranch, Ca, Us

$800MM manufacturer of recreational vehicles, ATV rims and light rail cars Provided strategy and oversight of all technology supporting 1.6MM square foot manufacturing facility and related offices. Managed a staff of 11 with a budget of $1MM, scope included: ERP, HR and financial applications, desktops, servers, networking, wireless and telecom. Managed vendor relationships, perform risk assessment, manage capital expenditures and coordinate multi-vendor solutions.• Implemented deliberate disciplined practices related to capital acquisition which took advantage of volume discounts from selected suppliers.• Introduced Agile, Scrum and Lean development best practices to improve application product delivery and meet customer expectations.• Led team through a series of upgrades to capitalize on emerging technologies and application enhancements, including the replacement of obsolete systems including iSeries and LAN technologies.• Designed, implemented and managed WIFI network covering 500,000 square feet of warehouse space which facilitated streamlining of inventory management practices.• Implemented all new comprehensive disaster recovery plans, processes and tools to protect enterprise assets.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

$13B packaged Foods Company with 50K employeesManaged and recruited highly talented Windows and UNIX systems administrators who designed, built, implemented, supported and maintained the server infrastructure. With a budget of $11MM implemented applications that included, Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft HR, SAP, Warehouse Management and enterprise email.• Managed and led a team of 10 through new data center build out and systems migrations from 2 data centers in Omaha consolidating service for enterprise applications delivery.• Planned and implemented a 60 server Citrix environment to support non-web based applications.• Designed and developed operations guide for Open Systems services. Led the development of server build standards for 400 Windows servers and 145 Sun Solaris/IBM AIX systems. • Evaluated, acquired and implemented systems management software from CA, BMC and Microsoft.• Established with Internal Audit and Information Security a UNIX and Windows server build standards and security parameters to meet Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.• Implemented all new comprehensive disaster recovery plans, processes and tools to protect enterprise assets.