My professional experience can be found on my LinkedIn page available from the link below, but the short story is I started my IT journey around 1993 as a system operator and developer for a large (the largest actually!) ticketing company in Sydney, Australia. Think UNIX (SunOS 4 on sun4m) with Wyse 50 terminals, lots of serial communications, Novell Netware 4.1 and a handful of 286/386 PCs running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. When the System Administrator left I was offered the job and then ran the whole computer operation for the next few years. This period was a time of great change. We migrated to Solaris 2.5, expanded the network to Queensland and Victoria and added many new integrations to the system including turnstile control systems at large sporting stadiums (SCG and SFS, Australia Stadium for the Sydney 2000 Olympics) and built the first gateway to sell tickets over this new fad called “The Internet”.

From there I did a number of ticketing system installs around the world (Alaska, San Francisco, Toronto) before leaving for Motorola to be the system administrator at the Motorola Australia Software Centre in 1999. February 2001 found me working at Veritas specialising on enterprise DR using NetBackup as well as clustering systems with Veritas Cluster Server (mostly Oracle RAC, some DB2 and SAP – but by far mostly Oracle 9i and 10G). Veritas was eventually bought by Symantec around 2005, but my role didn’t change much – I was providing on-site emergency support for NetBackup and VCS all around APJ. These were all large enterprise customers (lots of banks and telcos, some airlines, utilities and various public sector organisations) and I was fortunate enough to see lots of Asia (Japan, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and LOTS of Singapore!)

After 12.5 years at Veritas/Symantec I left for a small professional services company doing mostly NetBackup design and consulting as well as pre-sales. Around the end of 2014 I was approached by a cloud services company to work as a cloud architect where I was able to really get my teeth into cloud computing (mostly AWS with some VMware private cloud as well). These were mostly your typical three-tier web applications (database + middleware + web frontend) which was quite a change from the bigger enterprise engagements I was used to. Oracle eventually came knocking on my door (they were just introducing OCI and needed pre-sales people familiar with public cloud) and so I spent a bit over a year as a director pushing IaaS/PaaS services. Had some success with Exadata Cloud Machines, but the general cloud services weren’t as mature as what was available from AWS and Azure. I was eventually lured away by one of the previous VPs of Oracle Australia to come and work at a very small startup offering a privacy preserving solution using homomorphic encryption and some other advanced cryptography. The platform was built on Azure services which I had become quite familiar with as I launched the Azure portfolio at the previous cloud services organisation (Bulletproof Networks).

Finally in late 2019 I was approached to join Databricks as the Azure Partner Solution Architect for ANZ. In this role I was responsible for fostering the Databricks/Microsoft relationship from a technical perspective – so lots of training of Microsoft sales and field personnel, helping with technical pre-sales for Azure Databricks as well as fighting the good fight when Microsoft would push Synapse and then Fabric onto existing or new customers. A good chunk of my role was networking and security as well as integration of Databricks with other Azure services. My title has changed to Senior Specialist Solution Architect and the organisational structure has changed a bit but the role is still very similar, although there is much stronger technical focus now, as well as plenty of Fabric deconstruction and humiliation! Like many organisations we have pushed heavily into AI and that is now a major area of focus for me. I am very interested in agentic AI and in particular agentic support systems like advanced memory systems, model redundancy, routing and balancing as well as context recovery systems. Some of these topics will be investigated right here!