Mark Thornton Email & Phone Number

Leicester, England, United Kingdom

Being in the Field CTO role, Mark engages with organisations globally from the CIO level through operations to help guide them on their digital transformation journey. Leaning heavily on his time as a technology customer, Mark is a thought leader across multiple infrastructure disciplines ranging from storage, network, and compute, to engineered systems, disaggregated architectures, multicloud operation, orchestration, and design.Working with Dell’s product and engineering teams across… Show more Being in the Field CTO role, Mark engages with organisations globally from the CIO level through operations to help guide them on their digital transformation journey. Leaning heavily on his time as a technology customer, Mark is a thought leader across multiple infrastructure disciplines ranging from storage, network, and compute, to engineered systems, disaggregated architectures, multicloud operation, orchestration, and design.Working with Dell’s product and engineering teams across multiple solutions, Mark guides his customers and internal field-facing peers on technology strategy and industry trends, while leaning into his wealth of experience through working with countless organisations for over two decades.Combining infrastructure technologies, development practices, proven methodologies, and interconnected private and public cloud providers, Mark demonstrates how a true multicloud vision is realised.Areas of focus: edge, private cloud, colocation, and public cloud providers Show less

Charlotte, North Carolina, United States

Being part of Dell EMC’s Global Technology Office, Mark worked with global accounts on large-scale infrastructures and data centre designs with the end goal of recommending and delivering IT Transformation to meet business outcomes. This included utilizing modern design architectures such as leaf/spine networking combined with ACI and NSX, engineered systems, and intelligent orchestration. This included but was not limited to augmentation of existing brownfield infrastructures or designing… Show more Being part of Dell EMC’s Global Technology Office, Mark worked with global accounts on large-scale infrastructures and data centre designs with the end goal of recommending and delivering IT Transformation to meet business outcomes. This included utilizing modern design architectures such as leaf/spine networking combined with ACI and NSX, engineered systems, and intelligent orchestration. This included but was not limited to augmentation of existing brownfield infrastructures or designing greenfield architectures in multisite, multi-cloud environments.Technologies spanned many disciplines including engineered systems, converged infrastructure, hyper-converged systems, facilities, storage, network, compute, data centre management and orchestration. Orchestration and automation of solutions include leading technologies such as VMware, Kubernetes, Docker, Chef, Ansible, and Puppet to name a few.Mark fulfilled the role of lead expert in cloud technologies and evangelist for Dell Technologies APEX solutions. I provided guidance and enablement for private, public, and hybrid clouds for sales, presales, partners, and alliances across the Americas, EMEA, and APJ.In addition, Mark was part of a team that provided backstop guidance and leadership for all Dell Technologies engineered systems for field-facing SE’s and architects across the Americas, EMEA, and APJ, to ensure best practices and to prevent snowflake designs. This included Cisco and Dell compute, Cisco and Dell networking, and Dell Technologies' storage platforms such as XtremIO, PowerMax, Unity and PowerStore, and SAN fabrics – MDS and Connectrix. Mark successfully mentored countless architects providing deep technical guidance and architectural best practices. Show less

Charlotte, North Carolina, United States

In this role Mark was part of HPE’s Enterprise Solutions and Architecture team. Mark was responsible for working with Enterprise and Global customers across the east coast in an account overlay capacity driving scalable datacentre technology solutions. The charter for this role was to be the ‘expert in the room’ in datacentre technologies, industry trends and direction. In addition, designing and successfully driving proof-of-concepts (POC’s) in compute, storage, network, and datacentre… Show more In this role Mark was part of HPE’s Enterprise Solutions and Architecture team. Mark was responsible for working with Enterprise and Global customers across the east coast in an account overlay capacity driving scalable datacentre technology solutions. The charter for this role was to be the ‘expert in the room’ in datacentre technologies, industry trends and direction. In addition, designing and successfully driving proof-of-concepts (POC’s) in compute, storage, network, and datacentre management in diverse, complex customer environments. This included cloud technologies and orchestration. Mark spent time in planning, design and architecting of solutions, with full integration into the customer's environment at the level of layer 2/3 switching, SAN fabrics, and management. In addition, automation to demonstrate a solid end-to-end composable infrastructure experience via scripting, Containers and Hybrid-Cloud.Mark worked a wide range of product ranging from Composable Infrastructure, Converged Infrastructure, HCI, server, storage, network technologies, and management. He drew upon utilizing a large breadth of experience in VMware and Microsoft technologies, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other distributions while proving out the technology. Notable Accounts:Duke Energy; Lowe’s Home Improvement; Merck; Travelport; Iron Mountain; Regions Bank; Disney; HCA; Time Warner; MetLife; Ingles Markets; Norwegian Cruise Lines; SAS Institute; NetApp; and Proctor and Gamble. Show less

Charlotte, North Carolina, United States

As an Enterprise Architect, Mark worked with strategic HPE customers on IT strategy, vision, and IT Transformation. He consulted across all IT disciplines such as application, MDM, mobility and EUC, security, servers, storage, networking, and cloud, and used his extensive background in IT transformation to guide customers into software-defined datacentre technologies.Mark successfully delivered technical white-board and slide presentations for partner and customer meetings. These… Show more As an Enterprise Architect, Mark worked with strategic HPE customers on IT strategy, vision, and IT Transformation. He consulted across all IT disciplines such as application, MDM, mobility and EUC, security, servers, storage, networking, and cloud, and used his extensive background in IT transformation to guide customers into software-defined datacentre technologies.Mark successfully delivered technical white-board and slide presentations for partner and customer meetings. These presentations ranged from deep-dive technical sessions to CxO value-prop level discussions on how to accelerate a customer’s journey in IT Transformation. Show less

Charlotte, North Carolina, United States

Mark worked with strategic Fortune 500 companies across North/South Carolina to help set future vision in the server, storage, and network technologies. Through this, he consulted with customers and partners on technical decisions and infrastructure design. Some of the work includes datacentre consolidation, solution design, converged infrastructure implementation, and private/public and hybrid cloud computing.Mark successfully designed and led countless technical and complex… Show more Mark worked with strategic Fortune 500 companies across North/South Carolina to help set future vision in the server, storage, and network technologies. Through this, he consulted with customers and partners on technical decisions and infrastructure design. Some of the work includes datacentre consolidation, solution design, converged infrastructure implementation, and private/public and hybrid cloud computing.Mark successfully designed and led countless technical and complex proof-of-concepts with customers and drove those successes to large-scale implementations consisting of thousands of servers.During his tenure, Mark has written countless proposals, developed dozens of architectural documents, and been a key stakeholder of many successful high-profile profile projects.Some of the notable accounts Mark has worked with include: Lowe’s Home Improvement; Duke Energy; Bank of America; Atrium Healthcare; NASCAR; Delhaize America; Facebook; Greenville Hospital Systems; LAB Corp and State Employees; NC Credit Union. Show less

Charlotte, North Carolina, United States

During Mark’s tenure at AGDATA, he virtualized over 40% of the production server environment to reduce cost, space, and power footprint. This included implementing Windows 2008 R2 Microsoft Hyper-V environments, and a VMware server farm. He wrote countless process and procedure documents and documented server, storage, and network infrastructure which were undocumented at the time. This assisted the lean IT staff to efficiently and effectively manage the environment.Mark was… Show more During Mark’s tenure at AGDATA, he virtualized over 40% of the production server environment to reduce cost, space, and power footprint. This included implementing Windows 2008 R2 Microsoft Hyper-V environments, and a VMware server farm. He wrote countless process and procedure documents and documented server, storage, and network infrastructure which were undocumented at the time. This assisted the lean IT staff to efficiently and effectively manage the environment.Mark was also responsible for setting the strategic direction for IT server, storage, and software technologies --this included upgrade paths and roadmaps. While at AGDATA, Mark was responsible for assisting the company to become SAS 70 Type-2 and EHNAC certified. Show less

Cleveland, Ohio, United States

Mark was responsible for designing and overseeing technical solutions to solve complex IT and business problems. Some of the solutions included enterprise-wide OS migrations, automation and writing of complex tools to stabilize the client environment (implemented across 40,000+ systems), and early VDI research and implementation.He was also a key member of a team which set the enterprise-wide direction for Group Policy and OU strategies. This included user/system account settings, and… Show more Mark was responsible for designing and overseeing technical solutions to solve complex IT and business problems. Some of the solutions included enterprise-wide OS migrations, automation and writing of complex tools to stabilize the client environment (implemented across 40,000+ systems), and early VDI research and implementation.He was also a key member of a team which set the enterprise-wide direction for Group Policy and OU strategies. This included user/system account settings, and security policy levels for role-based computing.Mark wrote dozens of tools, utilities, and PowerShell scripts to automate processes, remotely configure thousands is systems and servers, and gather or correct data. Show less

Cleveland, Ohio, United States

Mark designed and implemented a Windows and Linux server environment for business-critical applications. Applications ranged from middleware for AS400, corporate email, payroll, file/print servers, and core infrastructure servers such as domain; DNS, and DHCP servers.

Nottingham, England, United Kingdom

IT phone support for: Server hardware/software; peripherals; PC and network configurations