Intigral is a Digital Media Start-Up based in Dubai. It was founded in 2009 and its remit is to develop a series of compelling content services that can be used as a point of differentiation by Telco's.I am responsible for all Software Development and Technical Operations at INTIGRAL. In this role I manage a technology budget of $10M+. I have a team of 60+ people which includes UI/UX Designers, Project Managers, Solution Architects/ System Integrators, Developers and Technical Operations staff.My main achievement has been the creation of a Pay-TV Platform solution that we have combined with our other core capabilities. This has allowed us to offer a turn-key Pay-Tv solution to Telco's and FTA broadcasters to help them generate new revenue streams. We investigated a number of potential partners in this space but all solutions were either too expensive or did not provide a customer experience that we were happy with. My team has constructed a Pay-Tv Platform using best of breed SAAS Platforms and integrated this with our own customer experience (UI/UX). My team also develop and operate the exclusive way to watch Saudi Premier league online (www.dawriplus.com)

In this role I managed a team of 40 people. They were a mix of Software Developers (Java, IOS, Android, Web), System Integrator's, Solution Architects and UI/UX Designers.I was responsible for a technology budget of $15M+. My team developed a number of products including:• A re-usable SAAS Multi-tenanted Pay-TV Video Platform (built around the Ooyala Platform)• A Netflix like SVOD Service for FOXTEL called Presto (www.presto.com.au)• A Sports website and Live Streaming App for AFL (www.afl.com.au)• A Sports website and Live Streaming App for NRL (www.nrl.com.au)

During the T-Box development we chose to re-use our existing backend platforms to accelerate the time to market and to defer backend development investment until our strategy was validated. Within 12 months of the T-Box launching many of these platforms traffic had increased by 100 -> 1000x and had far exceeded their original engineering assumptions. It was becoming extremely expensive to horizontally scale many of these platforms.During this period I moved into a Strategy role across the entire Media Engineering Department and began working on a replacement strategy for these platforms. We looked at single vendor Solutions from Ericsson and Cisco but we believed that the economics of these platforms ultimately wouldn't work as they required each customer to operate and manage their own instance of the video platform.As a result we looked at SAAS OTT Players in the market and narrowed our search down to thePlatform and Ooyala. I lead the technical assessments, which lead to the Series E $35M investment that Telstra made in Ooyala.

When I joined Telstra in early 2009 their media department had a large number of content services available to their customers (e.g. Movies, Music, 7 Free Online TV Channels and Free Online TV Portal). These services were getting very little usage as they were only available to users via their PC. To help drive usage of these properties Telstra decided to create their own STB called the T-Box (https://www.telstra.com.au/entertainment/tbox). It was a Hybrid PVR device that allowed the customer to have an enriched FTA TV experience and also complement it with other content (e.g. PPV Movies, OTT Live TV Channels). I was the Chief Architect on this product and had a team of 8 Solution Architects/System Integrator's. We developed the product in less than 12 months.In the next 12 months we also added a Pay-Tv Service called "FOXTEL on T-Box" to the platform. This service was 30 of the best FOXTEL channels delivered to the end customer over their broadband using OTT Adaptive streaming. This FOXTEL package was aimed at the "Pay-Lite" ($15->$35 ARPU) segment of the market. This strategy has been hugely successful. There are now over 800k T-Box devices in market.

By November 2006 we were selling a lot of lab evaluation units to Telco's but very few deployments had significant scale. For our business to succeed we needed to sell a lot more units to fewer customers as the current way we were getting revenue wasn't scalable.One of the main reasons that the services weren't getting beyond the lab was that the price that the Telcos had to charge the end customer was normally around $1/minute. This was far beyond what customers were willing to pay except for a small number of niche services (e.g. gambling, adult services).We believed that we could reduce the price per customer of our system by a factor of 10 by building a custom DSP board (more DSP's, latest DSP technology was 3x more powerful than our current board) and by migrating our technology onto a much larger chassis (21 slots instead of 4). We believed that this strategy would amplify our patented transcoding technological advantage and would remove a lot of the fixed costs that the Telco had by reducing the number of chassis they needed (e.g. cost of unique ISUP SS7 Code cost/chassis).We also believed at the time that for a window of time delivering video to a customer via circuit switched was a superior customer experience compared to IP delivery for mobile services due to:• Coverage and bandwidth issues with 3G IP connectivity, but we knew that this wasn't a sustainable advantage as Telco's were aggressively rolling out network infrastructure to fix this. •We thought a more sustainable factor was that it was much easier for a customer to dial a phone number to access video content rather than try to find it via the phones browser (clearly we didn't bank on the I-Phone!).During this period I lead a team of 30 engineers that developed the much higher capacity Media Gateway and I also spent a significant amount of time in building a team in Delhi, India and migrating the development and maintenance of legacy product to our team there.

It was difficult to find the right skills to build a Telco Media Gateway platform in Sydney, so In January 2004 I moved to San Francisco and worked with our VP Engineering to establish an engineering office in the Bay Area.During this time we developed a Media Gateway which was used by Telco's for two different commercial applications. The first application was video calling. In this scenario that Media Gateway sat between the Telco's mobile network, and their Fixed ISP network and allowed customers to make video phone calls between devices on these two incompatible networks.The second commercial application was a TV streaming service. In this scenario the device sat between the Telco's Mobile network and their data centre. This allowed IP based version of Mobile TV to be sent over 3G to end customers using the circuit switched data path. This was the only technical option in these early days of 3G Mobile deployments as IP network connectivity over 3G had extremely low bandwidth and coverage.We recruited a team of 20 engineers to build the new platform. I became the team manager of 6 software engineers that were responsible for building the signalling component of the platform. All of this software was written in C++.In addition to this we also were responsible for managing the embedded Linux image that our platform used, and inherited the responsibility for System Integration tasks.

Dilithium Networks developed patent protected software technology that could convert video in one format (e.g. H.263) into another video format (e.g. H.264) 10x more efficiently than traditional methods. It did this by exploiting the fact that normal algorithms did what we called tandem transcoding where the video was fully decoded them re-encoded. Our algorithms optimised the process by mapping between the two encoded formats without needing to decode the video. I was part of the Systems Engineering team that created ideas of how to use this technology and built these systems.Our initial aim was to develop a POC system to showcase the power of this technology to potential technology partners (e.g. DSP Providers, Telecom Technology Providers) but after showcasing this POC to the Vodafone group we decided to build this into our own commercial system.All the software that we developed for this platform was C/C++. The system that we developed was a CPCI chassis that contained a general purpose processor which was used for Telco signalling, and a custom designed DSP blade which was used for media and multiplexing adaptation

While I was completing my undergraduate degree I worked part time at Nortel Networks in the IT Department. During this time I did a lot of IT Support functions such as LAN Support, Email Support etc that helped me build a strong practical understanding of how IP works.I also developed a number of productivity tools in ASP.Net that were used by the staff of the R&D centre (e.g. knowledge database tool, staff locator tool).During this time I also was exposed to a lot of bleeding edge WiFi and 3G development that was occurring in the R&D facility. This practical experience re-enforced what I was learning in my studies and really gave me a head-start at the beginning of my career.