If you prefer, you can see my LinkedIn profile here. You can read more about my technical and managerial expertise on this page, my employment history on this page and Clusters on this page.
I was born and raised in London, UK and studied Astrophysics at King’s College, London in the mid-80’s. I have always had a love and passion for Mathematics and my career started combining Maths with computers in Banking. Inadvertently I became a software engineer and it has turned into my second passion.
After doing my technical apprenticeship in Banking my natural tendency to want to make things from scratch took me into a startup with a college friend and fellow Physicist. We had huge success quite early and completed a successful acquisition by Cognos Inc. in 1997 after 4 years of operations.
I then spent 10 years working for Cognos in both the UK and Canada, forming teams, managing across the Atlantic and creating and implementing enterprise software solutions. I rose through Cognos as a technical lead and a manager, retaining a technical presence and code responsibility in my teams. I parted Cognos as Director of Software Development for their Applications Division based at the corporate headquarters in Ottawa, Canada, where I spent 4 years.
In late 2006, with acquisition by IBM looming, I felt the startup urge again and in early 2007 left Cognos and Canada and returned to the UK to start two new businesses, Dialectyx and Clusters.
In the last three years I have been incubating and growing those businesses and creating IP in the domains of strategy formulation, sales pipeline management, data clustering, advertising campaign optimisation and non-linear segment attribution. I have a third company, HuPa, which is a joint venture with a partner in the UK, to develop and commercialise that IP and hold equity stakes in the subsequent businesses.
In the 2008 funding environment we found it increasingly hard to attract interest in the Dialectyx software proposition, although the consulting offering was popular. As a result we formed a joint venture with OneSource Business Information and Dialectyx now forms their business consulting practice in London. This was a good exit in the environment of the day but did not exploit the software opportunity so I chose not to participate.
Clusters was cash generating from the very first day of operations and has gone from strength to strength. They have recently moved to new offices on Bankside and their client list and reputation continues to grow. They are very profitable and growing even against the recently challenging eceonomic backdrop. I act as technical advisor and am developing further IP to allow Clusters to exploit some adjacent business opportunities, particularly in the area of segment attribution on large databases. We believe this could greatly increase Clusters’ revenues and extend the business into areas which are high value and traditionally difficult to tackle.
I recently joined Empathica based in Mississauga, Canada as CTO. Empathica provides insights to retail businesses based on direct customer feedback via surveys. We collect and analyse data on retail chain performance from the standpoint of customer experience and satisfaction. That information is turned into actionable intelligence delivered directly into the operational management’s hands in the retail branch network. We have world leading software and analytical techniques which allow for capture and delivery of data on multiple platforms and smart, immediate and meaningful insights to be drawn.
We also reach out beyond the immediate customer retail experience into the shoppers’ social network to provide the brands with high value first hand recommendations and insights into how they are perceived in their target markets.
Empathica is growing rapidly in an exciting area of interest which pulls on my strengths as a software manager, a strategic thinker and a statistician. If I hadn’t met them, it is exactly the sort of business I would have endeavoured to start myself, so I consider myself lucky to have found like-minded individuals and a profitable running business that I can attach myself to.
I live in Oakville, ON, Canada. I am married to the wonderful Hua Lin who works at HSBC, and we have a three year old son, Jack.
The Cognos Experience
My headcount responsibilities peaked with Cognos at a worldwide team of 85. I produced a collection of products in a variety of Cognos’ domains which won awards and generated new license and maintenance revenue streams. My most successful release generated US$6M of new license revenue in its first full fiscal year. In total during my time at Cognos the products over which I had direct development responsibility contributed to more than US$225M of revenues.
My reputation was as an innovator, a personal boss and an excellent technical engineer and architect. I personally recruited more than 50 people, 75% of whom are still with Cognos post-acquisition by IBM. Retention rates in my teams were between 80 and 100% over a rolling 5 years, which is extremely high in the industry.
I am immensely proud of the teams I built with Cognos and the products we created together – many of which remain in place. I had the best grounding in international professional software development management possible, while retaining cutting edge technical skills. I had the opportunity to manage extremely diverse and talented groups of individuals from all countries, cultures, backgrounds and technical domains in both the UK and Canada.
