Between July 1997 and July 1994 I had six employers (Harrison Willis through to iRevolution PLC). As I moved from role to role there was never any job-search or any interview. I changed employer as the project changed supplier. I consider these effectively one single role. This is how it panned out…
Jul ’97 – Started employment with Harrison Willis Ltd as ICT Director
Aug ’99 – Harrison Willis became HW Group PLC by IPO. The role is still ICT Director but group level. With a supplier (Integration Group Ltd) conceived and outsourced the desktop as a SaaS model.
Feb ’00 – HW Group PLC was acquired by TMP.Worldwide Inc. the owners of monster.com. Transitioned to CTO for Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Jan ’01 – The move from TMP.Worldwide to the Integration Group was to continue to supply the SaaS services to TMP.
Feb ’01 – With a small management team Integration Group executed an IPO via reversing into an empty PLC shell, creating iRevolution PLC.
Feb ’02 – Due to adverse market forces on the iRevolution business, suggested to TMP (who had now re-branded as Hudson Highland) as the person of the most logical choice to re-insource the SaaS services from iRevolution, and worked with Hudson Highland until Jul ’04.
…and this is what it was all about:
What problem does it solve?:
How to provide a standard set of applications and shared data to employees around the world while creating a supportable infrastructure that doesn’t require IT staff in every location.
Description:
The solution comprised NTAS, Citrix Server (who until just recently was still MultiUser Windows), our recently purchased recruitment application, MS Office, a new Intranet from where you launched the applications. Physical links were a combination of symmetric and asymmetric digital links with a carrying capacity of approximately 19kbit/s per user. Interesting with user’s work patterns, this distils down to 5 users in a 64kbit/s link.
This was done with the technology available in the 1990s. If I were to undertake this project now, instead of point-to-point connections from each office to the Global Switch Datacentre in East London, I would employ much larger low-latency Internet links and secure the data transport using an encrypted VPN.
Key Technologies / Skills Utilised:
WAN/LAN/NTAS/Citrix/AD/SQL/Data Integrity/Data Protection (DPR)
Why this project was chosen:
What we did here was groundbreaking for two reasons:
1) Historically, office computing used a centralised model. Dumb terminals connected to a single centralised mainframe. The onset of the graphical user interface (which was in most cases Windows) started a distributed computing revolution. This brought about a whole raft of problems that include managing multiple copies of data; users moving from device to device and having their own desktops; centralised management of account information; licences and the cost of them, and finally, of course, support. This project started the trend of supplying highly graphically rich applications while maintaining centralised control of the environment and data.
2) Centralising the solution outside of the organisation and renting it back on the per user per month basis created what was effectively the world’s very first Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. This is a model that today we are seeing adopted by more and more software vendors. This project was 1997, and it wasn’t until around 2004 that Gmail was launched, 2011 that office 365 was launched and SaaS delivery models became the favoured method for software distribution. Of course, this largely because from an investment standpoint, a business that had a recurring revenue income model had a P/E Ratio significantly larger than a traditional business (sometimes as high as 30:1).