About

I design it, I build it, then I stay to run it.

I am a cloud and infrastructure architect with over 17 years across EMEA and the GCC, and I currently head presales in the region. My depth is in the fundamentals: virtualisation, storage, networking and data. I have stayed close enough to the technology to still be useful in the detail.

In my own words

How I work

Close to the work

The scope has widened. The technical judgement stayed mine.

I co-manage a presales team across disciplines, and a good part of my week goes on people and the commercial side of a deal. The rest has a technical centre: discovery, solutioning, architecture, the analysis behind a proposal. That part still gets blocked time in the calendar. It is what makes the rest of the job credible.

I have taken on more scope over the years and I expect that to continue. What I want to keep hold of is the judgement underneath it. If I am accountable for a decision, I want to have understood it myself rather than taken it on trust. Titles are worth what sits behind them.

I would rather lead something I could still build myself.

The quiet skill

Rightsizing

A vendor's number is a starting point, not an answer.

A recurring thread in my work is sizing: taking a vendor's figures and sense-checking them against real contention ratios and real workloads rather than a spec sheet. It is unglamorous. It is also the thing that stops a design costing someone real money once it ships.

It is a quieter skill than headline architecture, and it is the one clients remember me for. I tend to be the last set of eyes on the detail before a proposal goes out.

Someone has to catch what the sizing missed. That someone is usually me.

The through-line

Biochemistry to cloud

I started with a biochemistry degree and no plan to end up here.

I am self-taught on every stack I work with. I moved from an early account-management role into infrastructure because the technical side was the part I kept reaching for, and I learned it by doing the work rather than in a classroom.

Over the years the depth has widened from virtualisation and storage into data, application and security architecture. To keep the hands-on side honest, I run a live production data platform I architected, built and operate on my own, PostgreSQL and PostGIS on Docker, end to end. It is the difference between talking about a system and being on the hook for one.

I design it, I build it, and I run it. All three, or it does not count.
Competencies

Hands-on, in production

Cloud architecture and design (Azure, AWS, OCI), VMware sovereign cloud, virtualisation (VMware, Nutanix, Hyper-V, Proxmox, OnApp), compute, storage and networking (Dell EMC, SAN/NAS, HCI), DR/BC and migration design (Zerto, Veeam, Acronis, V2V/P2V), technical discovery and rightsizing (LiveOptics, RVTools), containers (Docker, Docker Compose), ETL and data-cleansing design, PostgreSQL and PostGIS.

Design level

Multi-cloud and hybrid solution design, sovereign cloud, data residency and GCC regulatory compliance, high-performance and GPU compute (NVIDIA Tesla, Grid, DGX; Graphcore), data architecture across structured and unstructured sources.

Working knowledge

Container orchestration (Kubernetes, OpenShift, Rancher), application and integration patterns (REST and SOAP APIs, SQL and NoSQL, caching with Redis), AI-augmented workflow tooling (RAG agents, Claude Code for IaC scripting).

Security and compliance

GCC regulatory landscape, data sovereignty, GDPR, ISO standards, PCI, CISSP fundamentals (course completed).

Get in touch

Email is the best way to reach me. I am glad to talk through a cloud decision, a data-residency question, or a design you want a second opinion on, whether or not it turns into work.

Get in touch See the work