Monday, April 5, 2010

After 11 years, it’s time for a fresh challenge

Hey everybody,

After 11 years and 3 months, I can announce that I am moving on from my current position at IDEAS.

I’ve had some wide spread interest in the new position I have secured, so I thought I’d stick up a quick blog post. Firstly, it let’s take some time to review the past 11 years.

I started at IDEAS just shy of my 19th birthday in January 1999. I was hired as a Research Assistant where I was given a brief to look at comparative research on PC’s and laptops. This product was initially called CPSoho (Small Office Home Office), but was later renamed CPClient.

In January 2001, I was asked if I wanted to move into more of an IT Support role within the company to free up some development time from my mentor (Josh) which I accepted. At that time the company was still relatively small with only a handful of servers, however after a year or so the company had started to dramatically grow both in terms of staff to support but also the power required to drive the applications had also significantly increased. Some of my highlights are below.

In early 2004, IDEAS acquired a company based in New York, which I was tasked with the initial IT integration (Lotus Notes to Exchange migration amongst others). At this time I was supporting close to 60 staff members and the server populous had blown out to 28 physical boxes around the globe.

Looking back on my time at IDEAS, one of the “coolest” projects I worked on (also the hardest and most stressful) was in 2005 when I was asked to plan and implement the full relocation of all of the IT equipment in our New York office to a new premises in Rye Brook (close to White Plains). This was a godsend in that we had been struggling with old and unreliable equipment since the acquisition, but it was a project of epic proportions with downtime to be kept to a bare minimum. After 2 months of careful planning, I spent a month on the ground in New York in September to co-ordinate and action this move. There was literally blood, sweat and tears – However all of my planning paid off, and after some very tense moments and a false start, I was able to move the servers over and switch the VPN’s across.

Since then I’ve been tasked with an additional office move (although not as epic) for our Rye Brook office (moving to a different office space within the same building), assisting in the re-location of our UK based office to their new premises in Abingdon and the creation of the companies Disaster Recovery documentation for all IT Infrastructure world-wide and other various IT initiatives.


So – Looking forwards:


On Monday the 10th May 2010, I will be starting my new role as a Senior Consultant within the Technology Services team with the Australian arm of ESRI. ESRI are a large software company that are in the location intelligence industry and make GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software. Google, Bing and WhereIS maps are examples of consumer based GIS software packages.

My role will be a 50 / 50 split between customer technical support (which includes configuration, ongoing maintenance and technical support) and customer training (so I’ll be trained as a trainer to train the ESRI customers) all focused on their server products – So I’ll be specializing in Windows Server, IIS, .Net, SQL Server and SAN storage equipment, but all with a slight twist of being focused on the ESRI server side software products (such as
ArcGIS Server).


I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the staff at IDEAS for their support and friendships over the past 11 years. I have made some life-long friends which I will never forget.

I am excited to be moving into the next stage of my career and am bubbling over with excitement to see where the next adventure will take me.

Hope you are all well.

Phil