I'm a software executive with nearly 20 years of software engineering and software product development experience.

This has been gained in a range of industries and technical environments, spanning:

Even though I'm not too hung up re job titles, my business card (what a quaint concept!) typically contains words like: CTO, VP Engineering, Technical Director, Head of Development, etc.  No matter what I'm called, I'm usually found doing one or more of the following:

  • Building and leading high performance software product development teams;
  • product and technical strategy;
  • bringing agility to larger, more mature organizations;
  • adding process and structure to smaller, less mature organizations, enabling them to scale;
  • turning around problematic programmes and teams;
  • continuous improvement and transformational change;
  • bridging the business and technology domains;
  • controlling chaos

Having worked in both large international corporations running geographically-distributed teams, and in smaller, early-stage companies where a more “hands on” approach is needed, I'm equally comfortable managing “in the large” as I am managing “in the small” and can adapt my approach accordingly (and I can even do both at the same time!)

In addition to software product development (both product management and engineering), I'm also an experienced business leader / executive, and I typically represent the technical interests of the business in the senior management teams of the companies in which I work.

You can find me on LinkedIn and get more details on my professional background there.  But if you don't want to jump to LinkedIn, keep reading below for some more details...

Now...

I currently work for SunGard Financial Systems as Chief Technology Officer of Alternative Investments, delivering specialized solutions for hedge funds and asset managers who deal in alternative asset classes:

  • APT: risk reporting; portfolio construction, rebalancing and optimization.
  • FastVal: independent valuations, pricing, analytics and risk management services for a range of derivatives from plain vanilla to highly structured products.
  • Monis: analysis, modeling, pricing, trading and portfolio management tools for a wide range of asset classes, including convertible bonds, equity options, FX options and interest rate derivatives.
  • Front Arena for the Buy-Side: real-time analysis, pricing, trading, portfolio and risk management of all traded
    products – liquid and illiquid, OTC and exchange-traded, standardized and structured.
  • InvesTier: partnership and investor accounting / reporting solution for funds of funds, hedge funds and their administrators.
  • Investran: integrated front-to-back solution suite for private equity.
  • VPM: hedge fund portfolio management.

I'm based in London, but also have teams in the US and other locations in Europe.

Recently...

Prior to joining SunGard, I worked at at Yahoo in two senior leadership roles:

  • (Initially as) VP Engineering, Europe and Canada
    • I led the engineering teams in Europe and Canada and was responsible for all Yahoo’s regional properties - which weren't simply localized versions of global properties that Yahoo had developed elsewhere!  This included the various Yahoo "homepages" (uk.yahoo.com) and media channels (News, Finance, Sports, etc) for all of the European (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, etc) and Canadian markets (both Engish and French Quebec).
    • In addition to all of the properties in those regional markets, I was also responsible for Yahoo Answers, the 4th largest property in Yahoo’s global network, which was engineered and operated out of Europe.
    • In total, my European and Canadian teams developed, delivered and operated the products for 250MM unique Yahoo users who performed 15BN page views each month.
    • In addition to running engineering, I was also a member of the management team which runs Yahoo’s European business (one of the [then] four businesses/P&Ls which constitute the Yahoo business globally).
  • (Latterly as) VP Custom Solutions, International Markets
    • I was responsible for delivering ‘custom solutions’ products – predominately branded experiences and custom targeting – for Yahoo's advertisers in all global markets outside of North America.
    • My product and engineering teams were distributed across 12 locations (in the Americas, EMEA and APAC) and worked very closely with Yahoo's Ad Solution Sales teams in all international markets to deliver the solutions that advertisers couldn't simply buy 'off the shelf'.

In the Past...

Prior to Yahoo, I have been:

  • Head of Development at Misys Banking, initially working in core/retail banking, but quickly moving to lead the development of Misys's (then) new BankFusion banking platform.

  • Technical Director at Talgentra Ltd, a privately-held UK company – since acquired by Experian Decision Analytics – where I was responsible for the product development of Tallyman, a 'credit and collections management' enterprise solution, which is now an Experian solution.  In addition to Tallyman, I was responsible for corporate IT and was also a member of the management team which ran Talgentra's Tallyman business.

  • Head of Development at SRC Telecom.  SRC was – and remains – a privately held UK company, the Telecom division of which first acquired by Fluency Voice Technology and subsequently by Syntellect.  I was responsible for the development of SRC Telecom’s speech application hosting platform and delivering new speech recognition-based IVR solutions for CRM, call centres and DRTV.

  • Technical Director at Thales e-Transactions Ltd, where I was responsible for all product development in the UK, leading a team of ~60 hardware and software engineers, focusing on EMV IC card payment systems at the point of sale to support the launch of “Chip and PIN” payment solutions in the UK market.  I was also a member of the management team which ran the e-Transactions business in the UK.  Hypercom have since acquired the e-Transactions business from Thales.

  • R&D Director at Canon Research Centre Europe Ltd.  Canon's European research centre (aka CRE) has since closed but the "waybackmachine" can take you back to www.cre.canon.co.uk.  CRE focussed its R&D in the areas of artificial intelligence / machine perception (specifically on speech recognition, natural language processing and computer vision), information retrieval, 3D modeling and image processing.  I worked at all levels of the organisation, starting as Research/Software Engineer (in the NLP area specifically) and culminating as Director, with responsibility for the overall R&D organisation in the UK.

Even further back...

And prior to all of that, I spent 7 years at the School of Computing at University of Leeds in the UK where I obtained both a BSc and PhD in Computer Science, the latter focusing on computational linguistics and statistical natural language processing in Systemic Functional Grammar (under Dr Eric Atwell, a well-known expert in the field of corpus linguistics).


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