Summary

Technical leader with over twenty years of experience in architecture, data communications and programming with a track record of creating a technical vision, promoting that vision to the executive and boardroom level, developing the plan to implement and driving the plan to deliver concrete results with real financial impact for the organization.

Experience

Consultant

Chicago Mercantile Exchange

Assisted with the establishment of a new colocation business focused on high-frequency trading.

• Act as an internal advocate for the customer.
• Evaluation of physical security of the plant.
• Author data center customer policy handbook.
• Review all customer facing documentation, including contracts, marketing materials and the product guide.
• Aid in product development including service offerings and the technical operation of those services.
• Review the overall design of the facility.
• Create network and physical layout diagrams for customer documentation.
• Created a database to track latency between external data centers and our facilities.
• Developed C# application to merge customer documents from various sources (Word and PDF files) into secured PDF files, individualized for each customer.
• Developed Ruby scripts to verify and maintain the customer directory structure and update customer files.
• Designed and developed Javascript based authentication and creation scripts for the customer application and miscellaneous forms.
• Develop and maintain technical documentation related to the product offering including network and product diagrams
• Act as the technology expert for the team for server, networking and other issues as related to the design and implementation of the data center.

Michael F. Allen & Associates

Michael F. Allen & Associates is a business and project management consultancy specializing in construction and difficult, large-scale project management.

• Implemented backup solution for office and remote workers.
• Migrated web site from proprietary platform to an open platform allowing in-house management of the site.
• Miscellaneous system administration for Windows and Linux.

University of Chicago

Technical Project Manager for a 20,000+ phone Voice over IP (VoIP) rollout for the University of Chicago, including over 200 buildings located in the university, the medical center as well as several remote sites.

The project had been operating for over three years with little momentum and was lacking requirements and structure. Working with various departments within IT and Telephony, developed criteria for building migration and a deployment schedule for all buildings on the University of Chicago voice network. Rejuvenated the project and restarted the deployment of phones.

• Established minimum building specifications to support VoIP deployment. Used these standards to initiate a building audit across campus to develop an estimated cost and duration for the project.
• Created a common glossary of terms.
• Designed, implemented and maintained a SQL database linking phone counts, jacks, closets, buildings, cost and time estimates, work required and estimated completion dates for the entire deployment.
• Selected and implemented an online system for issue tracking, including writing scripts to import existing data from spreadsheets into the new issue tracking system.
• Restored the relationship between our project team and our Cisco Account Team.
• Established the need for, kicked off and lead the selection of a new E911 product.
• Authored the Statement of Work for the medical center deployment.
• Documentation of several voice and networking related processes
  • Telecom inventory management
  • Updated the network change control process
  • Wireless network authentication and troubleshooting processes
  • Joint Network Troubleshooting document to establish standards and protocols between the university and medical center technology teams
  • E911 and 123 (internal emergency number for the campus police) call flow and architecture
• Managed the build out of Call Manager and support services for the medical center CuCM implementation.
• Built confidence in the Cisco solution and our ability to support it within our existing telecom support team by working with Cisco to develop a TDM to VoIP feature / implementation comparison, demonstrating how similar features would be accomplished using Cisco’s solution and helping to highlight additional training requirements for our staff.

ShopperTrak provides traffic counting technology and analysis systems to retailers in over sixty countries

Chief Technical Architect

Work closely with the business to develop a technical vision and direction for ShopperTrak that will move ShopperTrak to the next level of business development. Once the vision has been created, present to executive management and the board of directors to “sell” the vision. Also manage and provide technical leadership to a team of six highly experienced technical architects ranging in skills from System Architecture to development in C++, Java and Ruby to Database architecture, development and design to implement the corporate vision and work with and provide leadership for other groups within the organization to ensure we stay on track and maintain our ability to effectively service our customers. Additionally I provide UNIX support and development as required.

• Stabilized the environment. ShopperTrak’s uptime for key customer-facing systems was in the low eighties. Developed and delivered on a six month plan to improve up time. Three months into the project availability consistently measured 99.5% and higher. Within six months we achieved 99.99%.
• Platform migration. Migrated the environment from an undersized Windows environment to a right-sized virtualized Solaris environment. Solaris environment uses Sun Cool-Threads servers and containers and new containers can be deployed in less than 30 minutes. All servers are LDAP authenticated and the environment has been locked down with a combination of firewalls and permissions to require passage through a bastion host to gain access to the production servers and data.
• Lead the development of processes and procedures as well as standardization in the organization to increase stability and predictability of the environment.
• Support ShopperTrak’s ability to grow while maintaining stability and performance. Over the last three years ShopperTrak has grown its device install base by 140% and doubled in revenue. All of our systems must be able to support this type of sustained growth for the next three to five years.
• Provided technical leadership and design in implementing a new Java based customer portal that provides all of ShopperTrak’s customers with access to analytical tools to better understand their customer foot-fall traffic and help them with staffing and other needs.
• Secured customer communication. Designed and lead the development effort of a new communication platform for access into customer’s networks to provide support and collect data from customer systems. Platform is a web service based on Ruby and SSH on Solaris 10. Company estimates for this new system are as high as $30M in new revenue opportunities.
• Real-time data. Designed and lead development of real-time solutions to provide data to our customers on a near-real-time basis.
• Reduced running costs and increased stability by providing leadership and contract negotiations for several key outsourcing arrangements including: Data Center, Backups, DBA services, system monitoring and e-mail.
• Increased candidate quality for new hires by bringing in staffing firms to aid in-house recruiting.

Aon is a Fortune 250 company whose primary businesses are in insurance brokerage, risk management consulting, warranties, and human resources consulting. Aon outsourced IT Operations to CSC in 2004; other than the migration to CSC's data center in New Jersey, my responsibilities remained the same.

Lead Systems Engineer/Internet Architect

Manage $250K/month outsourced Internet hosting, storage, security and networking providers to support multiple applications generating several million in revenue per month and provide technical and business guidance to be sure business and applications requirements are met. Also provide last tier of support for all applications and infrastructure within the data center.

• Renegotiated vendor contract. Reduced hosting and managed service costs by over $500,000 per year by negotiating a new $2.8 million hosting contract.
• Renegotiated storage contracts to save Aon $1.8 million over three years in managed storage costs.
• Help to develop chargeback mechanisms for internal billing of the hosting facility and budgeting purposes.
• With three-months notice, successfully negotiated a new hosting contract and relocated our 100-server web environment to a new hosting provider over a three-day holiday weekend.
• Consolidated hosting environment and saved the company over $1M per year in software licensing, hosting and support charges by migrating corporate home page and several customer facing applications into shared application environments and by consolidating hosted equipment.
• Increased availability of hosted applications 15% by working with the application developers, the businesses and various vendors to identify problems and proactively resolve them through a combination of change control, changes to the OS and the discovery and correction of memory leaks.
• Implemented rapid deployment mechanism for servers to quickly meet growing business needs by developing a Jumpstart server for Solaris and imaging processes for Windows.
• Within the limitations of the hosted applications, implemented standardized Windows and Unix deployments.

BlueMeteor, Inc. was a start-up application service provider (ASP) serving Fortune 500 and mid-market clients. BlueMeteor creates and hosts large-scale, web-enabled business solutions that integrate Internet commerce infrastructure with leading back office applications.

Systems Architect/Unix Manager

Joined company within the first two months of the company’s inception and, as such, had an opportunity to be in on the ground floor design and implementation of the company’s technologies as well as having a key role in the recruiting, selecting and management of the technical operations staff. Managed and mentored the Unix team and Windows NT Administrators. Also assisted in vendor relationship management, driving technology requirements into future vendor releases to be sure they fit into the BlueMeteor environment and the Internet Industry in general, focusing especially on the xSP market.

• Designed and built out remotely managed, lights-out data center space at Internet co-location facility, migrating it from a 2-cage VDC to 6-cages and installing over 30 systems.
• Designed on-call system to minimize impact on employees. The redesigned system helped in daily staffing levels and increased the responsiveness of after-hours support. It also greatly helped in recruiting new candidates.
• Designed and administered EMC/Connectrix SAN environment that connected 50+ Sun hosts including 420Rs and 4500s, to 5 terabytes of EMC storage via two Connectrix switches.
• Designed redundancy to support the company’s 365x24x7 SLA.
• Designed secure multi-client hosting environment to protect their applications from exploited vulnerabilities in other client applications as well as protect the clients from themselves as much as possible.
• Designed and implemented hot-backup environment for 20x Oracle instances using EMC Time Finder to minimize the amount of time the database spent in hot backup mode and provide quicker recovery.

A joint venture established by six of the major newspaper publishing houses to help to capitalize on the nationwide availability of the Internet to increase the exposure of each paper’s on-line classified ads business.

Senior Unix Systems Administrator

Responsible for administration of the NewHomeNetwork and Cars.com web sites and internally facing Unix systems. Monitoring of site performance and activity reporting utilities including Keynote, I/Pro and Accrue Insight as well as in-house monitoring tools. Other responsibilities included Linux support, maintaining Unix and dial-up account information, building and installing new systems, server hardening and Perl and Korn Shell scripting.

• Relocated web site hosting from an in-house data center to an Internet co-location facility. Responsible for the design of “cage” and the relocation and installation of Unix hardware and setting of new standards to support the remote environment. The project completed successfully with no disruption of service to our web site patrons.
• Two months after the co-location move, successfully completed relocation and consolidation of Chicago offices along with development and internal support Unix hosts to a new facility. This project also included data center design and standards setting to match the restrictions of the new environment.

Consultant

While contracting for consulting companies such as DPRC, TEKsystems and Romac International, performed various duties at Monsanto (Searle), CNA Insurance (subcontracted through CSC) and Ameritech including administration/support of Novell, Windows, Unix and Cisco environments, web server administration, HP Open View integration and writing C, Perl, Expect and shell scripts.

• Replaced Windows login script with Perl script, reducing the login size from over 250K to less than 20K of bandwidth allowing the customer to postpone upgrades to their WAN connections.
• Increased stability to one client’s Novell network from less than 70% to in excess of 99.5%.
• Automated various router management tasks using PERL and CGI for a large Telco provider including tracing traffic through their ATM network.

Systems Programmer, Networks

Responsible for development of customer NLMs and utilities, providing support for network, firewall, Unix, Novell and Windows systems, setting hardware and software standards.

• Relocated and redesigned the data center allowing for better utilization of the space where the mainframe and other older equipment had been located. Negotiated over $100,000 in reduced costs for new equipment purchases required for project.
• Developed and implemented strategies to both increase the stability of our Novell network as well as the client desktop systems resulting in availability increasing by over 20% for the servers. Client stability improved from three to four reboots per day to less than one per week on average.
• Worked with local police department and both internal and external investigative groups on computer related crimes and investigations.
• Evaluated, selected and implemented a new backup solution, reducing administrative overhead and stabilizing the backup system. This replaced an aging system that had a failure rate of over 50%.

Galaxy Holdings was a video distribution company supplying videos to many of the Blockbuster franchises and to retail stores as well as a video rental company.

Director of Information Technologies

Responsibilities included hardware and software support, custom application development, purchasing and selection of products as well as managing a team of people responsible for data entry and technical support. Also managed vendors and support contracts.

PC Specialist

Supported all “shrink-wrapped” PC software for DOS and Windows clients as well as C programming. Also supported all PC hardware and aided in the selection of software and hardware to set up company wide standards and supported a 250-note token-ring Novell NetWare 3.11 LAN.

Programmer Analyst II

Programmed on an IBM 3091 under MVS/XA and on an IBM-PC AT running PC-DOS to support the CPI Mortgage Loan System. Selected and converted the construction lending system from the existing DOS/VSE system (in-house written) to a networked PC system using CLCS. Worked on the teams responsible for converting commercial lending, secondary marketing and loan origination’s systems from current IBM software to the chosen Unisys packages. In addition to duties as a programmer, also assigned/tracked all current projects in the Mortgage Loan section for a group of four programmers and aided in supporting a 3COM LAN manager (3+ Open) Ethernet network.

Education and Training

Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science, Benedictine University

GPA of 4.0 and a recipient of the “Outstanding Scholarship in Computer Science Systems” award

Associates Degree in Computer Science (MIS), St. Petersburg College

iPhone/iPad Programming, Pragmatic Studio (2010)

Ruby on Rails Development, Think Relevance (2007)

WebSphere/MQ Architecture, IBM Raleigh Training Center (2001)

ECC Configuration Manager, EMC Corporation Training Center (2001)

Solaris 2.6 System Administration, NSC Systems Group, Inc. (1999)

TI Digital Networks, T-Cubed (1998)

LAN-WAN Internetworking, T-Cubed (1998)

Router Internetworking, Paradyne (1996)

Certified NetWare Engineer (National Data Products) (1993)

Skills

Hardware: Sun Hosts, up to and including Sun4V architecture, HP and Dell Servers, Ethernet, Token Ring, Laptops, FDDI, various brands of bar-coding scanners, cash drawers, host computer connectivity, modems including fax modems, plotters, and various printers, including PostScript.

Operating Systems: Debian and RPM based Linux distributions, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows Server and Desktop OSes, Solaris

Software: Cygwin, Ethereal, Lotus Notes (client), McAfee & Symantec Anti-Virus, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Visio, Network General Sniffer, OmniGraffle Professional, Personal Firewalls, ProjectWizards Merlin, PuTTY, SAMBA, SSH, SUDO, Sun Jumpstart, VI, VNC, VanDyke SecureCRT and SecureFX, Veritas Cluster Server, Veritas File System, Veritas NetBackup, Veritas Volume Manage, WebSphere

Programming Languages: C, C++, Java, Objective-C, Ruby, Python, Expect, Perl, Postscript, SQL, TCL, Unix shell (Bourne, Korn and Bash)

Current Home Environment: My home lab environment has largely migrated to an on-demand virtual solution hosted in Amazon’s EC2 environment running a variety of Intel-based operating systems including OpenSolaris, Linux (primarily Debian-based) and Windows 2003.

Personal Achievements and Community Involvement

Boy Scouts of America: Eagle Scout; earned the Ad Altare Dei and Pope Pius XII religious awards, completed the Great Oak Leadership Training Program; attended Philmont Scout Ranch, New Mexico twice. Held the following positions: Senior Patrol Leader, Assistant Senor Patrol Leader, Scribe, Quartermaster, Librarian, Patrol Leader, Assistant Patrol Leader, Den Chief and was a member of Leadership Corp.

St. Joan of Arc School Board Secretary chairing the Technology and Political Advocacy committees and co-chair of an ad hoc committee to redesign the school and parish web sites.

Member of YMCA Indian Princesses and Adventure Guides