Career · UK hosting and infrastructure
From frontline support to infrastructure and business leadership.
I’ve built my career through a variety of roles within the organisation, learning the business from the customer’s first phone call through to the infrastructure and teams behind it.
I now work as Deputy CTO in the Infrastructure Division at team.blue. My focus is on helping SMEs adopt AI by understanding their workload requirements and the infrastructure they need to support them. I bring more than 20 years of experience across support, engineering, operations and business leadership to that work.
For four years, I was Head of Infrastructure and Operations, reporting to the Group CTO. The role built on my experience of leading technical teams, managing infrastructure and delivering integrations.
I was involved in building data centres and migrating four data centres into a single site in Reading, alongside the integration of systems and platforms following mergers.
I’ve contributed to M&A across the UK & Ireland from the technical side, including technical due diligence and post-merger efficiency programmes. Alongside that work, I helped grow the business to around €70 million.
As Country Manager, I oversaw the UK business, bringing together the commercial, operational and technical sides of the organisation.
I went on to manage customer services, sales and support desks. My responsibilities expanded across regional and international operations within Register Group.
I moved into work as a data centre engineer and systems administrator, taking on infrastructure responsibilities and gaining hands-on experience of the systems behind the service.
I began in first-level technical support, talking customers through problems over the phone in the days of dial-up modems and free internet access discs bundled with PC magazines. Those discs installed an internet provider’s connection and sign-up software, which could also change browser settings. Some customers found their browser repeatedly opening the provider’s sign-up page and needed help removing the setup or putting their settings back. Helping people work through those problems taught me to listen carefully, explain things clearly and stay patient.
My career has included roles at iDesk, Ision Internet, NetDirect Online, Energis and NDO, followed by Namesco within Register Group and team.blue. Across those businesses, I’ve developed my experience in customer support, engineering, operations and leadership.
My involvement in M&A has been on the technical side: carrying out technical due diligence and developing post-merger efficiency programmes. The businesses involved have included:
My post-merger work has included consolidating systems and platforms, closing acquired data centres and migrating their services into our UK & Ireland data centre infrastructure. For me, this is about turning the technical assessment into a practical integration programme: bringing services together and making more effective use of infrastructure.
I’ve been involved in requests for proposals (RFPs) for compute, storage and network hardware, alongside supplier selection, vendor management and contract negotiations for hardware, software and data centre space.
My responsibilities have covered the UK & Ireland and work at group level within team.blue, bringing a technical perspective to supplier decisions and commercial discussions.