Working with a team to oversee major infrastructure and systems transformation projects

I am very proud to have been appointed Senior Enterprise Architect Western Sydney University. So much has happened over the last 18 months that a profile update is called for.Working with Senior IT Management and Portfolio managers I deliver strategic technical consulting on many key projects and provide ongoing support to ensure successful delivery.Some of the highlights of the last few years include:• Key author and technical lead of the University's Wireless RFT which is the final phases of successfully deploying one of the largest Wireless networks in the Southern Hemisphere, delivering significant improvements in user experience for our students• Co-Author and technical lead of the University's Border Security RFT which increases and expands the University network security footprint whilst delivering greatly improved Internet services to our students and faculty• Senior infrastructure adviser - Cloud Migration project. This project aims to reduce the University's management and maintenance role across over 1000 commodity systems to free up our engineering and operations teams to focus on delivering services more closely aligned to the needs of our students and schools• Lead infrastructure adviser - Student Management System. Assisted in the successfully RFT of this key functional environment I have been requested to take a lead role during both vendor negotiations and system migration over the next 2 to 3 yearsIn additional to the above I have delivered Senior counsel to numerous project groups as the demand arises with a specific focus on ensuring clean interaction between multiple projects in flight.

I joined UWS to fill the position of Quality Assurance Manager for their whole of environment LAN upgrade. My main responsibility was to ensure that solutions being proposed by vendors and integrators were in line with the university's requirements.As I progressed within the role I became far more involved in the overall architecture of the environment as well as coming up with the most effective deployment approach which would allow the necessary transitions to occur with the fewest - and briefest - number of necessary outages.I am also directly responsible for the design, implementation and delivery of their enterprise monitoring and alerting platform as well providing both formal and informal training to the university's support and operations staff.I am now working with UWS on the development of a number of other enterprise projects focused and networking, security, DR and datacenter which I will describe here as they move into design/RFT.My role at UWS has expanded to include senior input into projects including: DR, Wireless and Border Security.This is an exciting role where I am able to use my cross-technology experience to help the IT executive and the projects team to ensure that their various strategies can be integrated seamlessly together.

I am proud to have been offered a consulting role with UTS:Insearch where I hope to work with the team to deliver the best possible ICT environment for the faculty and students. I look forward to encountering new challenges and helping deliver new successes. Through my time at Insearch I helped Sarah and her team implement significant improvements to fundamental user infrastructure, security and processes and assisted in the development of long-term strategy.

After spending time with Big Corporate, I've gone back to my first love which is front-line consulting. Working predominantly with vendors and integrators that I have associated with throughout my career (along with some new organisations that value my skills). I am focusing on designing the right solutions for their clients by bring the right technologies and the right partners together to deliver a unified whole.Working predominantly in the Unified Communications space, I've already brought novel solutions to end-users in many verticals including Leagues Clubs, Professional Services and multi-site retail. The level of engagement and enthusiasm I have received from my partners, clients and their customers has allowed me to bring some truly game-changing business solutions to market.

Having achieved the twin goals I set out when I returned to EDV of helping them achieve prominence as Australia's top Mitel partner and launching a world-class cloud-base Mitel UC solution within the Australian market (I ended up building two), it's time for me to leave EDV again and focus on new challenges. Key achievements from this stint at EDV include:*Architecture of Mitel Australia's Cloud UC environment, many elements of which have subsequently been adopted by Mitel globally*Architecture of Aurilo, a fully cloud-based value-add UC solution hosted and recommended by Macquarie Telecommunications*Architecture of key UC and Network infrastructures from enterprise organisations including: Asciano, Rexel, Steinhoff AP, Downer EDI, Breville and Kennards HireI have returned to the company I helped found 12 years ago to continue their progression in becoming the top UC solutions provider in Australia. Since returning, we've already had several major business wins.I was responsible for providing technology leadership for the business and its clients by developing and maintaining strategic vendor relationships as well as designing best of breed multi-vendor ICT solutions for our clients. During my time at EDV, they became seen as a leading provider of Unified Communications solutions in Australia by clients and vendors alike.As well as working with the CEO to provide strategic direction, my focus within the business was to mentor technical staff members; helping them achieve their maximum potential within the industry through example, training and motivation.I assisted our customers by providing them with business solutions rather then technical solutions. I take an analytical approach to solution design, incorporating my client's current and future needs into what our ultimate offering becomes.My greatest pride in my work is establishing long-term relationships based on friendship, mutual respect and trust.

Having been enticed to join Gen-i at a time just shortly prior to their decision to wind down operations in Australia, I achieved little of note during this tenure.

I joined Frontline Systems Australia specifically to build their Networking and Security practice as part of the expansion of their services offering.Working with the business unit manager, it is my role to decide on the technologies we are going to market it with in order to define the appropriate solutions for our clients.The nature of Frontline is such that the majority of my work is in the Government, Large Corporate and Data Centre space offering solutions to many Australian Fortune 500 companies.My focus is on identifying the appropriate vendors and technologies to assemble the ideal "end to end" solution for my clients. This includes working with Networking from HP and Cisco; Load Balancers from F5 and Radware; IPS solutions from TippingPoint and Sourcefire; WAN accelerators from Riverbed and Bluecoat and a plethora of Firewall vendors.My second cap is taking the lead providing consultation and design around messaging and collaboration platforms where my years of experience with Microsoft back-end products allows me design and promote enterprise solutions built around Exchange, Lync/OCS, Sharepoint and the Forefront suite of security products.

I joined Accucom to extend their professional offerings into full Unified Communications Solutions.I worked closely with the Sales Manager and Technical Director to build world class solutions that exceed the demands of their customers and engineered for efficiency, resiliency and growth.I believe that strong vendor relationships are a key to providing the most effective solutions possible as it allowed us to take advantage of established global partnerships in order to provide solutions which take advantage of the strength of each product on its own merit rather then being reliant on just one vendor's offering.By building best of breed end-to-end solutions (i.e. Solution Design, Equipment, Integration Services and Carriage) we can offer our customers a single point of contact for their entire ITC needs who is large enough to have a robust infrastructure and strong team but small enough to provide the personalised service that our customers demand.During my time at Accucom, I was instrumental in authoring pivotal projects such as:A fully meshed IP Telephony solution for Catholic Education Sydney's Head Office and regional centres; along with road-map (and the initial project deployment) of IP telephony solutions into their 160 constituent schools.The concept, architecture and sale of a Wired and Wireless Network and centralised IP telephony solution for Retail Adventures; Australia's largest discount retail chain with over 350 sites linked in via the project.Materially responsible for introducing the Mitel IP Telephony platform into NSW Independent Secondary schools; with many of the state's most prestigious schools (including St. Ignatius College, Ascham and Trinity) as well as the AIS NSW office now employing Mitel Unified Communications solutions. I was also frequently invited as a guest speaker at numerous MITIE and AIS NSW events.

Throughout my career I have been approached repeated to provide highly specialised ITC design services for mission critical business projects. Most of these requests have come from word-of-most referrals made by former clients or colleagues.My focus in building these specialised designs is to integrate performance, security and reliability at a high level for infrastructures that may contain highly sensitive data and will likely be subject to external attack or audit. My solutions are designed for high uptime with minimal maintenance windows.Several of my solutions have been built for large, multinational companies are housed in centralised high-security datacentres.

My role at Telstra was that of a Technical account manager and Solutions Architect. I worked with a number of business managers, assisting them with Enterprise accounts including Brambles, Goodman Fielder, Comalco and Coca-Cola Amatil. My primary responsibility was to act as a primary interface between the client's business representative's and Telstra's technical design, project management and service delivery teams to ensure that the services and solutions that were required were being accurately and adequately delivered. It was also my responsibility to continually analyse the accounts I was working with to discover other avenues that Telstra could service the client. These could be anything from minor changes to complete WAN reorganisations.

I spent about two years as a senior SOE consultant after I left Deutsche Asset Management. I was initially employed to Design and manage the SOE Server and Workstation environment for Mannesmann Dematic Colby as they transitioned from a Novell Netware Environment to a Windows NT environment whilst they relocated their Australian headquarters from Frenchs Forest to Belrose.I subsequently provided similar services to several organisations, the most notable being GIO (where I was the project lead and responsible for the redesign and deployment of a 4500 user/220 site SOE solution) and Westpac (where I was employed as one of two senior SOE specialists to redesign the Westpac Banking user environment). Each project averaged between 3-5 months.

Overall responsibility for Implementing the transition of all Australian IT infrastructure away from the NSW Government network into a stand-alone Enterprise. Technical lead on the transition of the subsequent migration into the Deutsche Bank Australia network. Responsible for Design, Implementation, management and training of approximately 50 Servers and 12 sites (including Disaster Recovery).