Experienced Software Engineer and Manager
Accomplished in developing complex products in both startup and large enterprise environments. Experienced in architecture, contributing to the technical/product vision and leading promising individuals. Adept at recognizing and adapting to changing business priorities and working towards a common goal. Combines technical knowledge with business acumen to formulate and execute on forward-thinking product strategies. Visionary engineer with 18 pending software patents related to Cloud infrastructure management.
Objective
I love the process of creating new products and technologies. My favorite roles have forced me to learn new technologies under time pressure as well as using my existing skills and to prototype new ideas using leading edge technologies. In both cases I have proven to have a facility for breaking complex problems into smaller, easier to understand steps that allow rapid development by the team, accurate reporting, and efficient knowledge transfer.
July 2010 – present
Founder
STARTUP
Designed, architected, and engineered a self configuring Cloud server monitoring system. STARTUP's technology (18 patents pending related to Cloud infrastructure management) remotely discovers services, self-configures the management system for each discovered server, and integrates with the cloud platform to add and remove Cloud server instances from the management configuration. I bootstrapped the start-up, architected and built the product, developed the Web site, wrote the content and press releases, filed for the patents, and performed all technical and business tasks required to get a new enterprise off the ground.
The product is 100% Web UI based, but can scale from a small physical machine to a large cloud based server. I coded the entire system, using:
* C++ for multi-threaded, highly scalable long running daemons and services
* PHP for the RESTful API back end Web services
* AJAX (Javascript) for the Web UI
* Python to interact with many of the Cloud APIs
* Java for a highly scalable process to interface with VMWare's proprietary vSphere SDK
* Bash shell scripting for Web controlled administrative functions
* Management APIs (SNMP, WMI, TCP probing)
* Third party Cloud APIs: Amazon (EC2), RackSpace, VMWare, Moab, OpenStack
The mix of languages and technologies was necessary to integrate with a number of third party APIs. Small physical servers are based on Debian and Cloud based systems are based on Ubuntu.
Nov 2008 – July 2010
Consulting
TriActive SaaS Systems Management
Utilizing my depth of knowledge and experience in architecture, development practices, coding and QA processes to advise and augment a Web SaaS company on product direction and features, as well as helping in the coding of new features on:
* Windows (C#)
* Linux (C++, TCL/Expect)
* Mac OSX (Objective-C)
* iPhone (Objective-C)
July 2008 – Nov 2008
Senior Director Product Development
BMC Software, Inc.
Joined BMC to head up Product Development for their BladeLogic acquisition. Also assumed responsibility for the BPA product line of Capacity Management products. Managed 230 resources spread over 4 groups in Boston, Sunnyvale, Tel Aviv and Pune, India,. Within weeks of joining BMC, determined that the main barrier to the continued growth of the BladeLogic product line was quality issues. Customer issues were consuming all sustaining engineering resources, as well as a substantial percentage of core team resources. Found systemic issues with regards to scope management, change management, feature definition, lack of criteria for both development and QA, very few identifiable processes, and no QA acceptance/release criteria. Assessment was born out when several high-profile customers escalated issues to the executive staff. Created a Product Quality Initiative and presented it to our teams around the world, our most important customers, and to upper management.
Challenges identified were: 1) keep important customers on-board as we improved our processes and product 2) change the culture of our product development organization to emphasize product quality as the highest priority, and 3) set and achieve quality milestones for each release on our road-map. A requirement was that the entire organization bought into the process and goals.
Identified the problem early and created a detailed plan, processes, and milestones to measure success,
Plan recommended changing the priorities of the entire business (including sales and marketing) to recognize quality as the primary issue and to buy into the new plan that would result in a solution.
Four months after I joined, BMC initiated a reorganized the top management of the Enterprise Systems Management group. After discussing these changes with my supervisor, we decided to amicably part ways.
April 2007 – July 2008
Vice President Engineering
TriActive, Inc.
Manage development and operations teams at TriActive, a “Software as a Service” Systems Management vendor.
Systems Management on Demand v7.0, the new generation of TriActive’s product, was months late and over budget. Reviewed architecture and features/functionality on an ongoing basis. Implemented project tracking and initiated weekly prioritization of release features by the Executive Staff to provide focus. V7.0 was released in 7 months.
Service availability was at just over 94%. Reviewed NOC architecture, change management processes, and documentation. Put in place a protocol to facilitate and require dialog between software engineering and the NOC IT team to ensure that the impact of architectural and product changes would be vetted and planned for in both teams. Established a strict change management procedure, and a documentation procedure to ensure that a current view of the NOC infrastructure would always be available. Implemented a project to attain full operational redundancy of all software services and network devices. In 7 months, service availability was better than 99.99%.
Reorganized engineering, QA and IT teams to better delegate responsibility and ensure accountability by all team members.
Promoted and mentored two promising individuals into management roles and a third into a technical lead role.
Initiated a project to move from a large Oracle Enterprise Real Application Cluster on a SAN infrastructure to a segmented database architecture on discrete Linux based servers running Oracle Standard Edition One. This eliminated the Oracle RAC support costs, saving $50,000/year. It also enabled us to scale out our service at a cost of $11,000 per 150,000 managed endpoints ($33,000 per 450,000 endpoints). Growing the Oracle RAC and SAN infrastructure to support an additional 450,000 endpoints would have required an investment of $278,000.
March 2001 – April 2007
Vice President Engineering, Server and Datacenter Management Group
Altiris, Inc.
Altiris was a very successful systems management software start-up that was acquired by Sym...
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