Last updated March 2008

Resume

Summary

I’m seeking a position as Senior Architect for a middleware software product, and would like to be part of a company that is committed to delivering excellence and value to their customers. The company values the contributions of intelligent, mature staff. It seeks to build a culture that supports these values. It actively seeks the input of its existing customers and stakeholders in designing new releases, while also being willing to think outside the box to find ways to deliver additional value to them, and increase the company’s value to investors. The products enable their customers to bridge their applications with data and logic from multiple, disparate sources.

I have spent most of the 26 years of my software career building tools and technologies that have enabled customers to build solutions that bridge multiple systems, often allowing older, legacy applications to participate in leading edge industry innovations. My customers have ranged from small to large enterprises, in a wide variety of industries. I have strong communications skills and have repeatedly demonstrated the ability to bridge technical and end users to improve the quality and relevance of the products that I have been responsible for.

I like to be involved at all stages of a product or major release, from inception to design, and am able to contribute to all these levels. I am a very hands-on architect and developer, with a passion for technology. I am willing to explore new technologies, yet understand the need for customers to have results that are secure, reliable, high-performance, scalable, maintainable and affordable.

I like to take responsibility for all technical aspects of a product and would like to be the "go to" person for developers, testers, user experience and management. I’ll work with each of the development teams to ensure the consistency of their components with respect to the overall product architecture and goals.

I am able to translate product requirements into technical deliverables, to solve hard problems quickly, effectively but pragmatically, and to drive initiatives through the development team. When difficult product-level technical decisions need making, I will make them. When the impossible needs doing I’ll find a way do it.

In everything I do I design for scalability and trustworthy computing and I am a leading advocate for engineering excellence. I like to collaborate with the groups who are building the applications, keeping them informed and providing suggestions back into the product to ensure the product’s long-term vision and success.

I also like to mentor junior developers and help them grow both technically and organizationally. I intuitively understand the problems customers face; not only do I drive this knowledge into the product but I also support customer-facing partners as they confront and solve issues in the field.

I have a nearly instinctive ability to identify the most significant risks and find ways to prove the technology needed to get around these risks. By doing this, I am able to rapidly either move the product beyond those risks, assuring the company’s ROI, or identify serious issues that can affect budget before a huge investment has been made in the technology. This approach has successfully mitigated risk for my companies when working on major projects.

Professional Attributes

• Team Player - I engage and impassion others with my enthusiasm and my positive outlook.
• Passion to win – I thrive in a competitive environment, and find innovative ways to overcome difficult obstacles.
• Business acumen – I have solid experience building and influencing both small and large-scale businesses.
• Customer focus – I delight and engage customers with the best products and services, am aware of customer needs and anticipate the future.
• Market focus – I understand the big picture including market direction and key influencing factors.
• Business maturity – I have relevant depth and breadth of experience.

Personal Attributes

• Leadership – I drive for results.
• Intelligence – I am a life-long learner, constantly seek to know and anticipate technology in my field, and thrive amongst other smart people.
• Communication skills – I clearly articulate vision, technology and business factors to both technical and non-technical audiences, and have a knack for listening, and hearing what customers and partners are saying.
• Agility – I like to stay ahead of the curve.
• Self confidence – I believe in taking healthy risks.
• Pragmatism – I’m able to balance short-term and long-term influences.
• Impactful – I believe that I am able to personally affect my employer’s and customer’s business.
• Introspective – I am reflective, and able to change course.
• Self-critical – I continuously seek to learn and improve.
• Passionate – I am professionally immersed in middleware technology and solutions.
• Decisive – I am able to take a stand.

Experience

• CTO, Principal Architect and VP-level technical responsibility in middleware product development.
• Senior, hands-on developer, especially for solving sticky problems that stump others. Have extensive experience working with technical support from major vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems and others.
• Have built many middleware solutions that have been delivered to market.
• Have written detailed functional product specifications.
• Served as the evangelist and visionary for middleware technology to a wide variety of audiences.
• Possess an intimate familiarity with the complexities of the middleware solution market.
• Understanding of enterprise middleware products and solutions, including technology from Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and many other companies.
• Several times a Microsoft MVP – I am a community-minded professional.
  
• I have authored many technical publications and presented technical workshops.
• My companies and products have been business partners with Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Novell and many other companies.
• Involved in many standards-related groups over the years, I am a strong advocate of standards.
• I have authored and been awarded patents and trademarks, working closely with Patent Attorneys, and am knowledgeable of the process.
• I have worked to certify many products over the years and am a veteran of certification processes at Microsoft, IBM and Sun.
• I have extensive experience in many development environments, both Java and Microsoft-based, and have built tools that extend these IDEs to enable integration into disparate sources of data and business logic.
• I have experience working with Lotus Notes, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft Report Server, Cognos, Crystal Reports, and many other platforms that provide portal and/or BI capability.
• I have assisted customers who have purchased my products, and who are from many industries, including (but not limited to):
  • Financial, including:
    • Insurance
    • Banking
    • Cheque Guarantee
  • Transportation
  • Logistics
  • Manufacturing
  • Oil Exploration
  • Fulfillment
  • Retail
  • Salons
  • Defence
  • County and Municipal Government
  • Software Development including:
    • VARs
    • ISVs
    • Integrators
• I have designed demos and lunch and learn sessions to train internal staff, including both technical and sales staff.
• Quickly identify and determine how to mitigate significant risks in a new concept, so that we can determine, with the least exposure, the likely cost of a project.
• Work well with senior management, marketing, sales and other staff to bridge these various departments with the technical department.
• Understand the importance of security in a product, from inception to release.
• Have a long track record of successfully integrating very difficult sources of both data and business logic with new technology in effective, powerful ways.
• Certified the FusionWare Integration Server (and some other middleware products) for all IBM platforms including:
  • System i
  • System p
  • System z
  • System x
• Certified the FusionWare Integration Server (and some other middleware products) for IBM software products including:
  • WebSphere MQ
  • Lotus Notes
  • Lotus Domino
• Certified numerous software middleware products for Microsoft certifications.

Work History

FusionWare (January 2003 to present)

In late 2003, a new company called FusionWare purchased the assets of GA eXpress, including all the Liberty ePath products (which I was one of the authors of) and the new B2B Liberty Enterprise Server. I was offered a position as Senior Architect, and accepted this. About a year later, I was given the title of CTO.

The B2B Server product was announced in July of 2004 with the name FusionWare Integration Server, at which time it went into beta. We now have many customers using it live and a significant number of prospects and resellers we are working with.

The run-time component of the product supports secure sockets, client certificates, multithreaded processing, and remote administration over HTTP(s). The IDE includes an XSLT generator component that has undergone major transformations to make it capable of handling powerful, real-world transformation and user extensions.

Fincentric (July 2001 to December 2003)

My Role here was primarily Senior Developer working on the Wealthview Banking Developer Kit (WBDK), but because of my experience level, I also took on some management tasks, freeing up my manager to focus on other departments that he is responsible for.

The WBDK started out as a general purpose 4GL environment called PROBE, but is now primarily a tool for development of the banking application. It provides the following benefits:

• Language constructs familiar to C/C++ programmers
• Automatic garbage collection
• Tightly integrated database support
• Generates C code, then the Microsoft compiler generates machine code
• Automatic transaction and concurrency management
• Automatic recovery and retry of failed transactions
• Auto generation of stored procedures
• Metadata suppression (reduces network traffic)
• Simplified database access
• Automated forms management
• Automated schema management
• Simplified distribution of client and server components
• Automatic communication between client and server
• Patented support for time related transactions
• Application layer inheritance (delegation)
• High performance TP monitor, featuring:
•  
  • Memory isolated communication layer
  • Memory isolated business logic layer
  • Automatic NLB support

Accomplishments:

• Assisted with conversion from NetBIOS to Winsock-based communications
• Completed second prototype of deployment product using MMC Snap-in
• Documented and cleaned up WBDK build (working with OpsDev)
• Documented and cleaned up parts of time relationship legacy code
• Moved configuration data from INI files to Registry
• Currently prototyping and documenting required steps to make transition to Visual Studio .NET

Liberty Integration Software, Inc. (1992-2001)

I was one of the original founders of the company. In this position I worked with many authors of W3C recommendations including some of the original founders of XML.

The company was acquired by General Automation in October of 1996, and General Automation later changed its name to GA eXpress.

Accomplishments:

• Worked with Board of Directors of General Automation and Marketing Consultants to design ePath turn-around and go-forward strategy for the company.
• Produced a number of patent filings, one of which has been granted, some of which are still pending at this time.
• Listed in ODBC Hall of Fame [1] for significant contributions
• Worked with key accounts to ensure effective transfer of knowledge and quick and successful integration into their solutions
• Researched, Designed and Developed many standards-based drivers and supporting server-based technologies including:
  • ODBC Drivers
  • JDBC Drivers
  • OLE DB Drivers
  • SQL Engines that layer ANSI-92 compliant SQL on non-relational databases
  • XML-based servers

Customers

Elizabeth Arden Salons

Elizabeth Arden Salons [3] was a customer that acquired the Liberty ODBC technology in late 1996, along with consulting services. For a modest amount of money, we helped them get their online gift certificate system up and running. We connected their web site into their POS system for their salons so that it instantly integrated with it. This involved credit card validation, order processing, shipping and other features. The first month that the web site was active, with no advertising on their part, they made sales that exceeded their costs of setting up the web site. I wrote the original forms that they used for ordering the certificates.

After I left Liberty, Elizabeth Arden acquired my services to assist them with changes to the gift certificate system that allowed them to automatically schedule a FedEx pickup for delivery of the order, and other enhancements.

Furthermore, I assisted them with setting up a new system for booking appointments online.

For the Christmas 2002 sales season, I assisted with the print-a-gift enhancement to the gift certificate system. This allowed the user placing the order to have a gift certificate, bar-code and all, generated into a PDF and emailed to them. They could then print this certificate and have it immediately. This was done as a perceived convenience to their customers, but there was an unexpected benefit to it. Every year, orders come in fast and furious right up until a few days before Christmas, when it is no longer possible to schedule a fedex delivery in time to make Christmas Eve day. Then sales normally drop off. What happened instead is that the orders continued to build, but all shifted to the print-a-gift system. They took an unprecedented number of orders in a one-hour timeframe on Christmas morning! The enhancement paid for itself in those few days alone.

I continue to provide middleware services to integrate this customer's POS and booking systems into their web.

Reynolds and Reynolds

Reynolds and Reynolds (R&R) was another customer of Liberty. They provide automobile dealer management systems to over 60% of the North American auto dealer market. All of their present systems include several of the technologies that I helped develop at Liberty, mostly as part of their ERALink [2] system. While there, I assisted them in evaluating and integrating our technology into their systems, resulting in their signing a $5.7 million deal with Liberty.