Born in 1979, Ian has provided over 25 years worth of entertainment, comedy and inspiration.

During schooling, Ian showed a great apptitude for technology, science and mathematics. A glance at his leaving statement shows the quote “..looking forward to working in software engineering.”

Beginning his working life in a Tex-Mex restaurant back in ‘97 as a lowely bus-boy and line chef, Ian showed the quick progression that would become a staple in his later career. By ‘99 he was Senior Manager, stuck in a job he had only began to cover the bills whilst at college.

After a particularly nasty car accident in June 2001, Ian decided a career change was in order. Resigning from the restaurant he took a two and a half month break travelling in the USA. This trip involved driving from East coast to West, returning home from LAX and taking in places such as Miami, Key West, Pensecola, New Orleans, Dallas, El Paso, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Upon his return, he worked a number of joe-jobs waiting for the IT industry opportunity he had been looking for since leaving school. Working during the day as a temporary admin assistant for an executive recruitment agency and alternating in the evenings between tending bar in Wetherspoons/Lloyds No.1 and waiting in an Italian restaurant, it did not look good.

The break came in early January 2002.

Starting on a temporary basis, this break was working as 1st line tech support in the call center of a mid-sized UK based dial-up ISP who were just making the move into ADSL and hosting MS Exchange 2000 under the ASP model.
Within two years, Ian progressed from 1st Line, through 2nd Line and Senior Support positions moving into the SysAdmin team in January 2003.

During this 2 year tenure, at the end of which Ian had reached the dizzying heights of Lead Admin for the entire network infrastructure, highlights included Windows and Exchange 2003 deployment under Microsofts TAP program and the migration of 20,000 users from Exchange 2000 and Exchange 5.5. In place upgrades of 3 AD domains from 2000 to 2003. 5 vanilla deployments of Windows 2003 AD environments over 3 forests. Migration and consolidation of 1TB spread over 3 SAN subsystems in two seperate locations, into one consolidated SAN environment. Sharepoint and Exchange hosting with bespoke provisioning and the consolidation of over 5000 hosted websites from a multitude of second rate servers to the standard HP Proliant series DL360, DL380 and DL580.
Networking experience gained from this included L4 switching with Alteon and Nortel devices, L2 and L3 switching over Nortel, Cisco and (shockingly) a Windows 2000 RRAS server along with Nokia IPSO based servers running Checkpoint FW1 firewalls utilising VRRP.

After moving to London in 2004, Ian ventured into the contract market for Active Directory and Exchange consultancy before landing an IT Manager position with a software startup developing an RIA providing complete a Datacentre management solution.
Joining at a time when there were 8 employees in total, the upscaling of the company lead to project managing their move from an adapted townhouse office in Windsor to a brand new office located in Putney, London.  Ian was soley responsible for the procurement of equipment and services (HP Proliant servers, Nokia/Checkpoint firewalls, HP Procurve switching and SDSL connectivity), along with the entire deployment process. This included the laying of switch fabric, migration from MS SBS 2003 to a secure and redudent Windows 2003 Active Directory environment incorporating MS SQL, Sharepoint, Exchange, Sourcesafe and a number of *nix based applications such as Bugzilla.

In June 2005, after 6 months and with the migration and move complete, Ian left looking for a greater challenge and found it with Symantec (formerly Veritas Software), working on the excellent, large scale data archiving solution - Enterprise Vault.
Shortly after this, He left London for his native southcoast town of Portsmouth. Well just outside Portsmouth infact.

In 2007 Ian:

  • Spent just shy of 9 weeks in the United States.
  • Launched the beta of his first RoR project, to great success.
  • Added Objective C and Cocoa development to his bag-of-tricks.
  • Switched To Mac.
  • Got a proper motorbike.
  • Saw a whole lot of bands.
  • Drank a whole lot of beer and Jagermeister.
  • Restarted a University course after a couple of years break.

In February 2008, Ian joined the Symantec Mail Security team as Sr Regional Product Manager for EMEA.