One of three managing partners of Cloudar. My focus is on service delivery: cloud professional services and 24/7 managed services.

The COO is responsible for managing the organization's day to day operational and practical execution planning, oversee daily operations of the company and the work of the executives, lead employees to encourage maximum performance and dedication and manage relationships with partners and vendors.The COO is serving as member of the management team; this position's primary responsibility is ensuring organizational effectiveness by providing leadership for the organization's operational and project performance and evaluate performance by analysing and interpreting data and metrics. Working with the management team, the COO also contributes to the development and implementation of organizational strategies, policies and practices and sets comprehensive goals for performance and growth.The COO has the following broad areas of responsibility:• Manages and supervises all available resources (employees, equipment…);• Improves the operational systems, processes and policies in support of organizations mission -- specifically, support better management reporting, information flow and management, business process and organizational planning;• Seizes opportunities to create new or cutting-edge programs to achieve goals;• Plays a significant role in long-term planning, including an initiative geared toward operational excellence;• Drives initiatives in the management team and organizationally that contribute to long-term operational excellence;• Challenges change management to avoid conflicts between operational SLA’s and planned changes. Guards availability and maximize operational performance of customer solutions.The COO has the following authorities:• Enterprise-wide authority on the operational day-to-day affairs;• Override rules when deemed necessary;• Joins management meetings.

In this role I am still technically involved in projects. Next to these, I am implementing and managing Cloudar's Managed Services business. Additionally I am helping out with resource planning for all our engineers. All this spiced up with some pre-sales and service management activities.

Cloudar is a team of cloud architects, offering rock solid cloud solutions for any type of business.We design, build and operate high available and scalable environments based on Amazon Web Services.My own role is quite diverse. Every now and then there is some pre-sales and architectural activity involved. However, the bulk of my time is divided between technical implementation work and project management. For the technical part the focus is on large and complex migration projects from typical managed hosting environments to (managed) cloud on AWS. It allows me to use and master all sorts of fun and relatively new tools like Ansible, Puppet, Rundeck, Jenkins... The focus is on automation, so some scripting in Bash, Ruby, Python... comes in handy. On project management level I work closely with stakeholders at the customer side to make sure we deliver on time, on budget and on scope. I greatly value this close cooperation, and like to think of the customer more as a partner or colleague than as a customer.My job at Cloudar allows me to combine the two things that I do best. On one side use my technical background to implement cloud environments on AWS. On the other side use my planning and people management skills to facilitate these implementation projects.

Leading a team of highly skilled Implementation Engineers, while still working together on technical projects. The main focus of the team is the implementation of complete customer environments. Each engineer has a broad knowledge of storage, networking, virtualisation, operating systems, clustering... Environments can range from simple multi-tenant on shared VMWare platforms to private clouds over dual data centers. Apart from that we also function as a fourth line of escalation.Managed the team during a period of continuous change. Following the acquisition of Terremark by Verizon, the EMEA Implementation Engineering team needed to integrate into the global Implementation Engineering organization. This meant a change in product set, toolsets, procedures and policies.

Terremark is a company that offers managed hosting solutions. My job as an Implementations Engineer is building environments that were designed in close relationship with the customer. These environments range from simple single tier networks to multi tier networks, with in some cases cross-data center redundancy. The beauty of this, is that it allows me to work with, and master, a wide range of products and technologies. My play garden mainly consists of (but is not limited to):Cisco, D-Link and HP switchesCisco, Zeus and NetScaler load balancersCisco ASA, Clavister firewalls and iptablesMicrosoft Windows 200x ServerMicrosoft Clustering, SQL Server and Active DirectoryLinux RedHat/Fedora/CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE and GentooLinux Clustering and LoadbalancingVMWare ESXNAS/SAN/iSCSI (EMC, Dell EqualLogic, Netapp)Commvault, Symantec Puredisk and Syncsort Backup Express

When a lot of our services were being centralized in a large scale data center in Prague, 13 people out of a team of 40 were able to keep their jobs. I was one of the lucky ones.First task was migrating our more or less isolated environment into a worldwide Active Directory setup. This meant migrating all kinds of Unix (Bind, Bootp, Samba, NetBackup) and NT (Domain, WINS) services to Windows 2003.Together with two colleagues we have to keep the whole server and network infrastructure up and running, serving around 1000 users and 3 sites. Server hardware is HP/Compaq. Network equipment is Cisco. Servers software is mainly Windows 200x and Linux. File services are offered through a NetApp cluster.

Talking to the business about their needs and translating them into a technical solution. Sizing the servers, installing them and documenting support procedures.Setup and maintenance of a NetSaint/Nagios monitoring solution for the whole environment. Monitoring of servers, applications, network equipment and printers.

Picking up the PC Support calls that couldn't be solved by the Helpdesk team, and solving them either remotely or at the users desk. Given the type of users (Global Headquarters with a lot of senior management) being able to work under pressure was required.During this period I became responsible for the startup and follow up of a large migration project of around 1000 PC's from Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000.

The first few months of my professional IT life were at the helpdesk at DHL GCC. Assisting users on the phone, trying to solve the problem remotely (through SMS Remote Control) when possible, and distributing calls to other support lines when necessary. I must have been doing something right, as it didn't take very long to get moved over to the PC Support team.

Teaching to students aged 14-19.