Stephen Pratt Email & Phone Number

Cupertino, California, Us

Sunnyvale, Ca, Us

*Performance engineer contributing member, and ScrumMaster of the SecureMail Server scrum team.*Performance engineer and contributing member of the SecureData Appliance scrum team.*Maintained legacy CSharp performance testing tools updating them in response to changes made to the product.*Maintained and upgraded all performance lab equipment including Systems Under Test, Load Generators, Hardware Security Modules, and other required service hosts (i.e. Exchange, AD, Oracle servers).*Gave multiple presentations to the Engineering and QA staff on performance, load, and stress testing terminology and methodology.*Developed a tool to parameterize workloads experienced by customers in production in order to better perform custom workload simulations in the lab.*Conducted custom simulations of customer production workloads in the lab in an effort to discover and ultimately verify the fix for performance or load related bug.*Using JMeter running on Linux load generator hosts as a platform for testing, constructed new test tool suit replacing legacy, brittle CSharp test tools.*Conducted dozens of one off tests in support of efforts to optimize and enhance performance of sub-components of the product.*Worked with Support team and directly with customers on delicate upgrades and issues related to performance problems.*Jointly submitted a blog post on the effects of Encryption on performance (https://www.voltage.com/encryption/does-encryption-hurt-performance/).

Fort Lauderdale, Fl, Us

*Maintained seat on SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) Mail Server subcommittee and continued in the capacity of benchmark co-developer.*Contributed to the release of SPECMail2008 - the first SPEC IMAP benchmark.*Performance engineer and contributing member of the GoToTraining scrum which eventually led to the release of the new product.*Performance engineer and contributing member of the GoToMeeting Scalability scrum.*Conducted performance testing and evaluation for: training materials upload/download, Beta 3.5 of the GoToMeeting product, and on-going load testing for the current Scalability project.*Built C++ and Java versions of the GoToTraining Trainer and Student robots - benchmarks used to simulate actual end point (client) activity.*Built Java version of GoToWebinar Organizer and Attendee robots.*Reworked and updated GoToMeeting Organizer and Attendee robots.*Built benchmark test manager control script to control all aspects of the benchmarks.*Worked with other teams to perform load testing and analyze results.

Santa Monica, California, Us

*Maintained seat on SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) Mail Server subcommittee as benchmark development lead.*Received SPECtacular award 2007 for work completed and on-going on the SPECimap industry standard IMAP benchmark.*Conducted all internal performance measurement exercises including characterizing performance of new appliance product for the Education e-mail vertical and characterizing server performance of custom plug-in programs for individual customers.*Participated in RFI and RFP engagements, conducted product demonstrations, assisted in customer’s product integrations and user data migrations, worked with customer technical resources to construct proof-of-concept installations, and assisted the North American sales team in all technical aspects of the sales cycle.Wrote step-by-step “how to” documents for customer consumption. Topics included: setting up automatic call distribution, setting up hunt groups, configuring soft phone clients to register and function with the CommuniGate Pro SIP server and all its functionality.*Co-wrote article for Linux Journal on use of CommuniGate Pro as a VoIP server.*Worked with Feith Systems on integration of their MailIQ backup product with CommuniGate Pro.

*Constructed automated mixed workload (IMAP, POP, SMTP, webmail) test for nightly performance testing. This enables to monitor the performance impact of daily changes made to the product and make corrections to keep the performance at desired levels.*Constructed a benchmark test harness for the University of Phoenix. The test harness was based on a customized version of the SPECimap benchmark*Performed custom performance simulations for Cable&Wireless-United Kingdom (C&W) for the purpose of determining how an upgrade and new feature affected performance. As a result, received the Outstanding Achievement Award from Vice-President of Engineering*Benchmark development lead of the SPEC Mail Server subcommittee*Developed the SPECmail2008 benchmark which is an industry-standard enterprise benchmark*Developed PERFsecure internal benchmark designed to generate SMTP traffic based on real Spam and Virus corpuses for testing message throughput of security products. This was used for developing competitive data for marketing collateral as well as evaluating potential business partners’ technology*Performed an on-site custom performance simulation at the University of Chicago. This simulation was the key factor in a large sale of messaging servers. As a result, received the Outstanding Achievement Award from Mirapoint Director of marketing as a result*Conducted and published a 1.25 million user SPECmail2001 benchmark result, which featured the Hewlett Packard SAN subsystem attached to Mirapoint messaging servers*Developed tools for capturing, sanitizing, and reducing customer production data. This data was then used in custom performance simulations for customers and resulted in product sales*Performed a custom performance simulation for Network Solutions’ ISP Division, to properly size a large-scale messaging server deployment*Maintained all performance lab equipment*Performed feature and platform performance characterization including the impact of SSL

Palo Alto, Ca, Us

*Scheduled, managed, and performed UNIX users’ system and data moves for both individual and project moves as well as hardware relocation*Maintained load balancing of users on servers by transferring data. *Maintained network documentation

*Designed tools for packaging customer data which was then used for data migrations from proprietary databases to open Oracle and SQL database engines*Performed customer data migrations. Migrations entailed consultations and scheduling with customer, sales, and support*Performed systems resource planning, post-migration follow-up, resume image conversion, and delivery of migrated data to the customer*Analyzed Y2K software patches for OS, designed a roll-out program for delivery of patches to customers, and performed product upgrades

San Jose, California, Us

*Worked in Electronic Commerce Group with Marketing to increase site capacity and ensure system reliability and accessibility*Improved website operations by working closely with vendors to implement state-of-the-art software and hardware technology*Responsibilities also included ensuring availability and optimizing response time of Internet servers, maintaining back-ups, and planning and implementing the growth of the McAfee website

Responsibilities included providing technical phone support to educational lab personnel including troubleshooting lab issues, coordinating hardware repair by third party vendors, and documenting software bugs for repair in future releases of the product