Time for reflection

Today marks the end of quite a few era’s in my life and the start of new adventures and challenges.

The most important of these is my son’s last Y12 examination.?Our Y12 students have had 2 years of massive disruption, changes to routine and impacts on their schooling and social activities.?They have had to work around continual changes to teaching styles, cancelation of key events and milestones and build friendships without the benefits of face-to-face social interactions.?I am proud of the man he had become and that he already has conditional acceptance into three universities to study his passion for music.?As a #prouddad, I would be remiss not to plug his music (Aixiom - Sound Cloud) and hope that he finds success in following his North Star.

Personally, there have been many changes in direction for me, but it gave me the opportunity to revisit my passion for learning.?Last Friday, I did my Confirmation of Candidature for my PhD at Deakin University.?The program, PhD Xtra, provides a staged approach to learning and the confirmation meeting is an opportunity to have direct feedback on the literature review, approach and plans moving forward.?I am grateful to the support of my supervisors and the panel that reviewed my work to have been given an unconditional pass, which means that I can continue with my studies and, plan to submit my thesis in last 2022.?For those with an interest in trust, fault tolerance and complexity within cloud deployment models, I am happy to have a discussion at any time.

Finally, it was a time to change roles at work.?In starting at IBM, 9 years ago, I worked with a great team supporting the Telstra account, with some members of the team still supporting the account today.?It was a great team with George Dres, Arun Rajendran, Vicky Rose, and Ben Neale, who are still at IBM as well as Tim Frawley, and Jenny Sanchez.?To the team, I remember some of the deals that we helped build, especially the E25K's, the Middleware services and the Tandem/BillPay management plans.??

Following on from Telstra, I worked with the team on SCE and SCE+ and who would have thought that was a forerunner to the work with SoftLayer and its connection models for new and existing customers.?I was lucky to be in the right place to help design the Frontbone extensions with Anthony Giannecchini and David Zhang to connect our first major customer in Australia to SoftLayer.?Working with Tony Stein to migrate SAP services from Poughkeepsie to SCE+ to support a major supply chain customer made for interesting nights, weekends, and migration planning.

I then took the plunge and moved from GTS (now Kyndryl) to GBS (now IBM Consulting) and worked primarily with Tom Crawford to drive Cloud engagement throughout Asia Pacific.?With Ian Abraham as the sales executive, we worked on RIO for Predictive Analytics, and CT Group for an online web presence.?I was privileged to work across the region, covering deals in China, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, working primarily with our Banking and Financial Services clients, although the designs and work I am most proud of relate to the Australian Tax Office with David Gordon and Neil de Lang?from IBM and Cam Maxwell and his team from AWS, as well as the work with EDI Downer and the?local SoftLayer team.?For our friends at the Tax Office, the work I designed helped build on the IBM/AWS partnership (Dan Carr) and laid the foundation for more work with AWS.?Passing both the external IRAP and independent security and design audits was a highlight and demonstrated the capabilities that we brought together across multiple partners.?Building an operational team in Ballarat to support AWS services helped with work across several industries and helped build a portfolio of work I am proud to have been a catalyst for.

I then met a few people from our Global Markets teams, working in Korea initially both as an SME on Financial Services when SoftLayer was first opened in South Korea, and subsequently with a manufacturing client driving highly available Cloud deployments.?This led to my appointment as a Red Team leader for another banking client;?Wendy Toh brought me in on the recommendation of Andrew Kupetz, who I had worked with previously and saw me working with Jim Freeman?who would eventually become my manager in another role.?A six-week engagement with Simon Kofin-Hansen, Rob Faferko and Vernon Rodrigues to make recommendations and remediation plans had me travelling every week for six months as we built a full-service management offering and cloud deployment model for a major bank.?Letina Connelly, then offered me the role of APJ Cloud CTO for Global Markets in the Strategy practice; a role I was looking forward to doing.??

6 weeks later, I was moved into the NAB Integrated Account as the CTO and Cloud leader, a role that was to increase my understanding of banking and finance as the team focused on how we can change the delivery models for NAB.?Raoul van Engelshoven was a strong Managing Director and ably helped by Roy Lovli and Andrew McDougall, but I learned the most from my colleague Sean O'Donnell?who is not a technologist but a Banking SME and taught me more about the rule, regulation and legislation than I ever imagined possible.?The NAB account was a family and with Jane Chen, Geoff Brooks, Richard Payne, Kelly Savannah and the rest of the team, I enjoyed the banter that came from a passionate, high performing team.?It was a tough engagement, but success came in a number of areas, especially as I designed AWS offerings for NAB, whilst we drove network and storage solutions into IBM Cloud.??

Finally, I moved into the Global Cloud Engagement hub, led by Ravesh Lala and locally by Sonia Basser.? This was a great team to work with, especially my local colleagues of Jeremy Caine, ?Robert Brodie, Vikas Makkar, Jay Paturi and not to forget Francis Lee.?As a team, we worked closely together, each of us helping each other and positioning the IBM messaging and models across banks, airlines and FMCG engagements.?When Sonia Basser moved to be the NAB IA leader, I was again acquainted with Jim Freeman, who had moved from a colleague to a friend and now my manager.??

There are other memorable moments and I have not fogotten you Ron Gottschalk and the first meeting with an IBM Fellow that changed my expectations of IBM!

There are many more friends and collegues that I have worked with at IBM/Kyndryl, and many are friends that will continue as my time at IBM/Kyndryl comes to a close, but I am looking forward to the next challenge that starts tomorrow.??