Patrick is an Electronic Engineer who has worked for several multi-national companies, both in South Africa and in the UK/Ireland. Much of his early experience has been as part of large and small R&D technical teams designing and developing hi-tech products.After completing his Masters of Electronic Engineering in 1989, he joined Ziton as part of their R&D design team, designing fire detection equipment. In 1992 he relocated to the UK and joined GPT Video Systems’ (Now Marconi) R&D team where he was responsible for designing and developing the electronic hardware for several subsystems of the company’s latest Video Conferencing products, working on projects in the UK & internationally.In 1997 he joined 3Com’s international R&D team (spanning UK, Ireland & USA) designing Application Specific Integrated Chips (ASICs) for the company’s latest Gigabit Ethernet technology for LAN Superstack II and III Switches. He is also the co-author of several USA and UK 3Com networking patents.In 2004 he returned to South Africa and completed a full time MBA at UCT’s Graduate School of Business.Upon completion, Patrick founded Precision Technology in mid 2005, which is an IT Networking company providing professional and affordable networking and IT solutions to SMEs. Over the years Precision Technology has formed strategic partnerships with many companies. 2024 is now the 18th of trading and the company is growing steadily. When not busy with the “serious stuff”, Patrick can be found negotiating with son John and daughter Meghan or drinking good wine with his “better half” Wine Journalist Joanne.Specialties: LAN/WAN Design for SMEs, IT Business Solutions, Proxmox, Nutanix, Certified Cisco PartnerUS PAT. NO. 1 7,023,873 Network device including detection of link status employing auto-negotiation2 6,868,088 Automatic detector of media interface protocol type3 6,839,360 FIFO storage including pointer misalignment detection4 6,763,031 Network device incorporating selective compression of stored data packets5 6,680,908 Network switch including bandwidth allocation controller6 6,661,803 Network switch including bandwidth controller7 6,625,684 Application specific integrated circuit with dual-mode system for externally accessible data buses and visibility buses8 6,496,478 Method and apparatus for controlling traffic queues in network switches9 6,418,118 Network device including selective discard of packets