Reporting to the Chief Commercialisation Officer, responsible for supporting and often leading Frontier’s portfolio companies that are software-based, including companies specialising in innovative approaches to AI. The role covers director level commercial strategy and being hands-on when needed, assessing new technologies, and representing Frontier’s interests at director level on multiple boards. Accomplishments include: • Raised £750k across two startups from high-net-worth individuals and debt funding.• Took a proof-of-concept research project to market, driving a new customer and product driven approach, winning the portfolio company their first customer.• As interim-CEO, responsible for leading a portfolio company focusing on customer growth. Led two customer wins on a new product. • Recruited and onboarded two fulltime CEOs.• Designed and gave investor pitches for fundraising across two portfolio companies. • Led sales engagement with remote and on-site customer meetings and demonstrations of products. Resulting in paying customers, being used as reference sites for marketing.• Mentored three startups without management teams. Also assessed and spun down a fourth startup.

Celerum develop logistics optimisation AI-based software products using Nature Inspired Computing, learning from how nature has evolved to solve complex problems efficiently.

Director of this exciting start-up using innovative ways based of document searching using forensic linguistic principals for AI-driven document searching. Driving the product vision and implementation to commercialise and grow the business.

Reporting to the CEO, Mark was responsible for the development and management of all Bango’s products and services, for implementation of the company’s technical vision, and for developing and leading Bango's product development team. Accomplishments include:• Led delivery of company’s largest project for Amazon in Japan and Seattle, managing the activities spanning multiple stakeholder groups. Resulting in successful on-time delivery, generating a 50% increase of the total end user spend generating revenue year on year, making it Bango’s biggest customer.• Built a prototype for a new product offering and led implementation onsite with Google Nest in California. Launched with Amazon for resale bundling of subscription entitlements, now a significant additional revenue stream.• Performed technical, product and team assessment for acquisition, resulting in the purchasing of an Italian data company.• Built cloud-first engineering team using micro services architecture on Amazon Web Services (AWS) using DevOps best practices. This created Bango’s next generation payments platform, allowing a move from legacy constraining architecture.• Led product strategy and roadmap delivery, providing closer customer engagement and up-sell opportunities. Also implemented company-wide product management processes and new roles of product manager and owner.• Established technical standards ensuring adherence in areas such as product development, quality, security, and maintenance. Led cross-functional teams to embrace a DevOps culture, resulting in improved quality through deployments.• Led, line-managed and restructured the customer integrations project delivery team to focus on improving customer satisfaction. Achieved with improved processes and deskilling how projects were implemented. This significantly improved speed of project delivery, customer relationships, and saved costs. This also removed project work for software engineering teams.• (See CV for more)

Reporting to the CTO in Colorado as part of the global technology leadership team, Mark owned European product development design and delivery, as well as the enterprise I.T. and application support functions. Being responsible for around fifty staff including managers, in the UK, Germany, and Netherlands, plus offshore team members. Accomplishments include:• Led design and delivery of a new business rules portal product for the European Healthcare Exchange. Creating with product leadership a significant new revenue opportunity to attract new customers as well as grow existing revenues. Collaborating with European customers onsite to get their feedback, and with the GHX software and product teams in America.• Part of global team designing and building GHX’s future cloud-based platform, built in Amazon Web Services (AWS) using no-SQL with intelligent switchover functionality to migrate traffic automatically based on quality rules.• Responsible for Europe’s first product installed in America integrating with U.S. healthcare systems for item catalogue management. Designed to integrate with the transactional exchange service-oriented architecture.• Advised on acquisition activities with complementary business in Canada for the U.S. organisation, building close working relationships once acquired. Allowing new combinations of technologies to be packaged for global offerings.• Led first European cross-department shared goal initiative to drive customer satisfaction across departments. Spanning product development, customer and application support, and service delivery, resulting in breaking down silos and improving customer relationships.• Transformed the Netherlands product development team, restructuring and aligning to European and global product development processes. This allowed delivery of investment-led product refactoring including moving between data centres.• (See CV for more)

Reporting to EU VP of Technology, Mark was responsible for all European product development teams and their budgets. Leading product development delivery, driving cross-location collaboration, innovation, and implementation of best practices. Managing a team of thirty across the UK and Germany, including managers. Accomplishments include:• Led successful integration with U.S. product development organisation to drive strategic and process alignment.• Led move to Agile at scale methodology across European teams, integrating into global product development teams. Improving planning processes resulting in better roadmap delivery, and transparency against deliverables.• Built first European wide matrix product development department capable of dealing with all European country location product needs. This successfully moved away from siloed mentality for local and remote country team members. With a result of more efficient product planning, reuse of software components, and improvements in staff training.• One of three first members of the European leadership team ever sent on the company’s boot camp leadership training program for senior executives, previously only available to the U.S. organisation. Applied learnings across all European teams.• Created first European product development innovation weeks, from creating the concept to driving alignment with EU leadership and product management. Delivered multiple successful innovation outcomes with demonstrable business benefits.• Became responsible for the European application support team in Germany, supporting all applications for customers in Europe. Improved cross-team collaboration resulting in more efficient support ticket handling with improved customer satisfaction.

Reporting to UK country manager, Mark was responsible for leading UK product development teams in defining and delivering the product roadmap to meet the UK business strategy and customer needs. Accomplishments include:• Led key account management meetings with all tier-1 UK customers to deliver a new reporting product. Resulting in extra value for suppliers, improving the utilization of the GHX platform, and addressing customer needs for extra client growth.• Implemented first European development team Agile methodologies to define process and best practices. This was initially for UK teams and then rolled out for teams in Germany. Significantly improving planning and delivery of the product roadmap.

TecSol Ltd. was a ten staff startup software development company, supplying packaged and bespoke products to the National Health Service (NHS) and allied organizations within the United Kingdom. Its software solutions were implemented across the UK, ranging from full NHS Trust e-Procurement systems to departmental stock-control systems and e-commerce gateways. TecSol was acquired by GHX to become GHX’s UK office, beginning a growth and merging phase joining the GHX Europe organization. This saw the move from a startup to an SME with significant scale and expanding the product footprint across Europe.Promoted to head of service and responsible for the evolution of the business critical SAAS B2B Transactional ‘UK Exchange’. Accomplishments include:• Built from the ground up GHX UK’s B2B eCommerce Exchange SAAS product, acting as lead architect and designer. Programmed using Microsoft .NET frameworks building for scale. Also designed the data centre needs, maintaining deployed software and interfacing with customer systems. • Provided project management, technical support, and visited customers to collaborate on product roadmap features.

Mark joined TecSol to take their largest customer, HM&S Hospital Services, through the year 2000 upgrades required to their legacy IBM AS/400 BPCS system, completing the project on-time and with no downtime to the business. Later moving to the latest Microsoft Visual Basic version to start building TecSol’s next generation of client-server applications for installation in hospitals around the UK.

Mark was the second software developer in what became a larger team, leading technology choice and adoption, from IBM AS/400 RPG programming language, and TAS Professional on the PC, to object-oriented languages including Visual FoxPro.

Honed RPG skills working on IBM AS/400 bespoke customer solutions, becoming more involved with customer requirements including attending on-site visits with project leaders. Showed aptitude for customer interaction when providing customer support as part of regular development duties.

Progressed quickly from a trainee to junior programmer working along side more experienced System 36 and 38 developers, developing mainly bespoke customer systems. Also provided in house IT network support, from fixing user problems to installing new cabling systems.

Left sixth form A levels in Computer Science and Graphic Design to take home programming skills into the industry, joining a growing software house specializing on IBM System 36, then 38, then AS/400 RPG platforms.