Mar 1996 to Jun 1997
Texas Instruments Software Limited
UK Network Manager
Kempton Point, 68 Staines Road West,
Sunbury-on-Thames, Middlesex
Texas Instruments is a global, high-technology company with annual revenues in excess of $13 billion. Texas Instruments Software – founded in 1982 – can justifiably claim to be the world leader in application development software tools and services. The daily growth of the software business required that I radically change the network design and plan the improvements that would occur over a five year period.
Changes included taking the local network, consisting of a campus of 1000 users, from a routed design over three sites connected via 64Kb leased lines to a single 8.2km FDDI ring model incorporating Ethernet switches and HP 100 VG at each site.
I had recently completed a project to install point to point FDDI connections to a collapsed backbone FDDI switch which resulted in major cost savings for the company and eased the IT management burden. [See NetworkNews, April 30 1997]
The network supported a number of different servers including Novell, NT and UNIX. I planned and co-ordinated a migration from NetWare to NT.
In addition to this, I ran specialised services such as an LU6.2/SNA gateway and an automated fax transmission server.
The outsourcing of the helpdesk and deskside 2nd level support to Hewlett Packard was one of the largest projects with which I was involved. The system was prototyped in the Nice, France office, then reengineered and re-launched in the UK.
My involvement included creation of SLA documents between HP and TI, SLA documents between TI and TI users (its internal customers), matrices and measurement, and escalation procedures.
The implementation of the first European Intranet server was a major success for the team.
Based upon Microsoft IIS, an SQL database and incorporating Active Server Pages, this was the first of hundreds of web/ftp servers that appeared throughout Europe within the space of six months.
My Texas Instruments experience required simultaneous work on large and small projects. Smaller projects included, but were not limited to, the provision of an SMS server for network management, the creation of roaming profiles so users could move from station to station while maintaining their personalised settings and the commissioning of a sniffer/protocol decoder.