About Me

Professional Experience

I have over 20 years in the IT industry, including 14 years in executive management. Nearly all of that has been spent working in commercial software in what today is known as Software as a Service (SaaS). I am passionate about leading teams and companies to world-class success, and have pushed the envelope in my development and operations organizations. I love creating teams that innovate, grow, produce high quality, customer-driven features on time, and I enjoy helping individual team members grow personally and professionally.   Mission critical SaaS systems, innovation, development, quality improvement, and creating leaders are passions for me, and I love what I do.

Prior to 2000 I worked as a consultant for corporations such as Ford Motor Company, Shell, Promus Hotel Corporation and Hilton Hotels. From 2000 until 2011, I served as the Chief Technology Officer of ServiceU Corporation, taking the company from a startup company to a world-class payment processor and SaaS (Software as a Service) provider. In 2006 I led ServiceU to become the first Level 1 PCI Ticketing Service Provider in the world. In October 2011, ServiceU Corporation was acquired and became part of the ACTIVE Network, where I have served as Vice President of Enterprise Architecture and Software Development. In my current role I am responsible for teams in several countries, and have helped those teams achieve a level of velocity and quality that leads the industry.

Though in executive management, I have also worked very closely with my teams and the Microsoft SQL Server and Windows Server development teams, participating in early product decisions, the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for SQL Server 2005, 2008 and 2012, and the SQL Insider’s group. In addition, in collaboration with Microsoft, I have written and coauthored technical white papers, case studies, and speak at major technical conferences such as TechEd, TechReady and the SQL PASS Community Summit.  I am also a SQL Server MVP.

For Fun

While I do love what I do with the technical community and with Microsoft, I am also a professional skydiver with over 1600 skydives. I hold ratings as a Tandem Instructor, Accelerated Freefall Instructor, I am a freefall videographer, and am also a wingsuit instructor. Wingsuiting has brought a whole new level of excitement to skydiving for me, and you can find me on any given weekend out “flocking” with other wingsuiters or teaching new students to fly.

Why do I blog?

I frequently am asked why I spend my time blogging if I could instead spend it jumping out of airplanes. As I said above, I am passionate about what I do, but I am also frequently frustrated by the lack of unified content surrounding specific products or features, or ways that the industry is moving in the wrong direction when there are simple solutions for problems. Many times, in order to implement a methodology, process or technology correctly, it is necessary to read numerous white papers and blogs on related topics, take your best guess, do some testing, and then hope you didn’t miss anything. My goal with this blog is to simplify some of those processes and help others in the community to quickly and easily understand technologies, process and how implement best practices – without the need for all of the research and testing that I do.

So while I would love to be jumping out of planes every day, I also love technology and helping others be successful in their own organizations and careers.

Check back soon for new topics covering management issues I have seen and how you can be avoid the mistakes that many companies are making, especially as they move to Agile (which I fully support!).