Description

I have experience in/with the following:

Networking

Routers: Cisco (ISR and ASR), Meraki

Switches: Cisco (Catalyst and Nexus), Arista, Meraki , Extreme, HP

Access Points: Cisco (Stand Alone and Controller Based), Meraki

Firewall: Cisco, Juniper, Checkpoint (With SmartConsole), Watchguard, Fortinet, Sonicwall, Palo Alto (With Panorama)

WAN Technologies (From ISP and end user perspective)

Leased Line, LAN Extension, xDSL, MPLS, EFM, SIP, VPN (DMVPN, IPSec/GRE, SSL, Remote Access), 3/4/5G, Frame Relay, ATM, ISDN, Dial-Up (I am that old)

Security

E-Mail: Cisco IronPort/ESA, Barracuda, ProofPoint, Bluecoat

Web: Cisco IronPort/WSA, Trend, Bluecoat

AV: Trend, Sophos, ESET, Symantec

AAA/2FA: Cisco ACS, NAC, ISE, Radius, PKI/Certificates, LDAP, 802.1x

L2 Protocols

Spanning-Tree (PVST and MST), VTP, 802.1q, Q in Q

Routing

OSPF, BGP, VRF, route manipulation, route redistribution, route bleeding/leaking, VRRP, HSRP, GLBP

RIR

ARIN and RIPE, applications for new allocations, inter and intra-RIR transfers in and out

Telephony

VoIP (Mitel), SIP (Gamma private and public)

Virtualisation

VMware vSphere (5.x, 6.x, 7.x, 8.x), Hyper-V, Azure Stack

SDN

NSX-V, NSX-T v2.x, 3.x, 4.x (including migration from NSX-V, Hyper-V, Cisco SD-Access

EUC

VMware Horizon DaaS, VMware Horizon View

Monitoring/SIEM/RMM

PRTG, SolarWinds Orion, Pingdom, DarkTrace, vROps, LogicMonitor, Rapid7, AlienVault, Datto, DesktopCentral, LANDesk

Languages

English
Native or bilingual

Workplace preferences

Remote only

Primarily works remotely

Calligo
Various Roles
September 2017 - February 2025 (7 years and 5 months)
Coventry, United Kingdom
Senior Cloud Specialist | Sep 2017 – Nov 2017
Global Services Lead of Networks | Nov 2017 – Aug 2018
Global Infrastructure Manager | Sep 2018 – July 2019
Vice President of Platform Services | July 2019 – Feb 2022
Director of Cloud Infrastructure and Engineering | Feb 2022 – Jan 2024
Head of Platform and Network Architecture | Jan 2024 – Feb 2025

With each change came extra responsibility but also kept the previous ones.

Over the 7 years, Calligo (previously based solely in the Channel Islands) acquired 9 cloud, voice and hosting companies across north America and Europe. I was responsible for the design, deployment, management and monitoring of the global network and cloud platforms. At the peak I was responsible for 13 engineers spread across 9 time-zones.
Due to the lack of group-level project management, I became the de facto PM within the Cloud Services team. Not only was I responsible for the full Cloud Stack, the team building and supporting it, I was also responsible for technically integrating the new companies and the customer migration projects. In the process we consolidated RMM, backup, network monitoring and documentation tools. Being the only truly global team, I spearheaded merging the different cultures and developing the “Calligo Culture”.

As a group we used automation tools such as PXE/KickStart scripts, PowerCLI, PowerNSX, Terraform and Ansible to refined the characteristics of the POD we reduced the deployment time from weeks to days.

From a networking perspective I was solely responsible for:
• Global network, 6 - 13 DC locations, between 70 and 120 Arista Switches
• 20 x public Internet BGP peerings, ARIN and RIPE address space, over 60 x /24
• Meraki office infrastructure (8 buildings), 8 x MX, 16 x MS and 40 x MR
• Physical firewalls - Cisco ASA, Checkpoint, Fortinet, Sonicwall
• Virtual Firewalls - Palo Alto, Juniper, WatchGuard, pfSense
• SDN - NSX-V and -T
• Load balancer - F5, NSX-AVI and HA Proxy
• PRTG and LogicMonitor instances
Abtec Network Systems
Senior Network Specialist
August 2011 - August 2017 (6 years)
Market Harborough LE16, UK
At Abtec I had the same job title however the role changed greatly. When I started, Abtec were a pure network reseller of BT, Virgin, Eclipse and Vodafone. Over the 6 years we built out 2 DC's in Telehouse so we could buy wholesale and overlay our own L3 network. Built on Cisco ASR and Nexus 3K, it also housed a VMware/NetApp hosting platform for customer usage and hosting of virtual Mitel phone systems.

• Provided redundant public Internet peering
• Managed redundant private Gamma SIP peering
• Stretched VMware hosting platform
• Resilient L2 circuits to Virgin, Vodafone, TalkTalk
• Resilient xDSL links to Vodafone

Abtec offered 3 main WAN services:
• Private MPLS/IPVPN (Leased Line, EFM, xDSL) – early version of SD-WAN
• Public IDA (Leased Line, EFM, xDSL)
• IP Telephony (on-prem or hosted Mitel) peering privately with Gamma (Leased Line, EFM, xDSL)