PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY:

• Commitment | Leadership | Integrity
• A strategic, senior IT leader, trusted as a confidant to deliver IT initiatives impacting all areas of the enterprise.
• Dedicated to maintaining a reputation built on quality, service, and uncompromising ethics while driving innovative technologies and methodologies across dynamic IT landscapes.

AREAS OF EXPERTISE:

• Technology deployment
• Project Management Office
• IT infrastructure
• Process improvement
• Business transformation solutions
• Server and desktop virtualization
• Windows engineering and operations
• Customer relationship & resource management
• Microsoft Operations Framework
• Agile project management life cycle
• Strategic & tactical planning
• Disaster recovery
• Development Operations
• Staff leadership & change management
• Succession planning
• Problem resolution
• Managed service providers

TECHNICAL PROFICIENCIES:

Platforms: Microsoft Windows Server - VMware - Citrix - RedHat - Mac OS X

Networking: LAN - WAN - WAP - TCP/IP - DNS - DHCP - HTTP - SSL/SSH Tunnelling

Management: System Center (CM/OM/DPM) – Tivoli – 3Par Recovery Manager – ArcServe – Commvault –HFNetChk – BigFix – HP (SUM, SIM, ICE)

Application: Office 365 – AWS – Azure – Exchange Server – SharePoint – Mobile Iron – AirWatch – SQL – IIS – Dynamics CRM – Great Plains – Check Point Security – McAfee Enterprise – Symantec Enterprise Vault – Remedy – Jira - Confluence – CA Service Desk – Global Relay – Salesforce CRM – Forcepoint DLP – Zerto

Hardware: HP/3Par – Cisco UCS – Dell – IBM – Cisco/Meraki – Barracuda – F5 – NetApp – InfoBlox – BlueCoat SG

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

Confidential, Chicago, IL

Vice President

Responsibilities:

• Actively supervise a lean team providing infrastructure, engineering, architecture, operations, application, project management, database, and end - user technical support across twenty U.S. offices, London, and Hong Kong: supporting multiple investment strategies & trading, institutional asset management, and capital markets & investment banking groups.
• Define and maintain standards for multiple projects including but not limited to completion and deployment of Office 365 to 700+ users globally, enterprise cloud storage solution, migration of multiple applications to the cloud, and physical planning and conversion of three new offices (NY, CT, and CA) from recent acquisitions.
• Principle individual contributions include reduction of server and storage hardware footprint in all Mesirow-owned and co-located data centers, while driving on-premises technologies to cloud-based solutions. This contributed to the reduction of annual operating expenses by over $500K.
• Responsible for $4.7MM budget, which includes infrastructure hardware, software, and global managed service providers.
• Facilitate and optimize current business continuity and disaster recovery processes, fostering user collaboration with multiple test and support groups.

Confidential, Chicago, IL

Director, IT Systems & Software

Responsibilities:

• Oversaw total strategic, management, and operational efficiency of global IT resources supporting server infrastructure, automation, project management, unified messaging, network operations center, end-user computing, and level-one help desk.
• Managed architecture, engineering, and operations support staff, providing automated solutions to the network operations center and help desk. These efficiencies helped reduce incident resolution times and improved SLA compliance by 50%.
• Maintained availability of 99.98% uptime throughout the organization’s back-office and trading floor technologies, while providing executive leadership regular key performance metrics.
• Successfully led and prioritized 20+ projects ranging from large to small, within scope of budget and timeline.
• Accountable for the development and deployment of the end-user computing support model and the strategy involving automation and orchestration initiatives.
• Led company-wide enablement of business intelligence strategies and process automation through SharePoint workflows for various groups including business development, human resources, legal, internal audit, and compliance teams.
• Ensured compliance with information security, internal audit, FINRA, SOX, and SEC during regular multiple audits.
• Contributed to an overall average cost savings of $1MM per year in co-location fees, and provided a complete disaster recovery solution for secondary and tertiary operations sites.
• Realized a recurring annual cost savings of $500K+ by collapsing the Novell file and print functionality into Microsoft Active Directory.
• Personally supported the Chairman of the Board, CEO, CIO, and CTO on several key initiatives within Confidential and its strategic partnerships.

Confidential, Chicago, IL

Manager, IT Infrastructure & Operations

Responsibilities:

• Directed and coached 25-30 global management and support staff professionals, supporting multiple functions and roles, including but not limited to: server engineering, network operations center, development operations, project management, global messaging/collaboration, and multiple cloud initiatives.
• Managed program and multiple project teams for successful delivery of 16 major and KTLO projects, including email migrations (Office 365) for multiple global Confidential business acquisitions.
• Continuously reviewed analytical data while measuring gaps in service level. Determined corrective action and tactics for improvement, and implemented preventative measures.
• Ensured infrastructure was in compliance with information security and internal audit standards (PCI & HIPAA) including creation of business continuity, disaster recovery, and contingency plans for Confidential ’s top ten financial customers.
• Reduced annual targeted run rate budget by $3.7MM through contributing to off-shoring 36 FTEs worth of lower-level, operational work.
• Contributed to delivering an OpEx savings total of $1.25MM through rationalization of enterprise storage by mapping out server to application ownership and identification of data waste and removal.
• Provided a total cost savings to company of $865,000 by identifying and reclaiming a significant amount of virtual server infrastructure, reclaiming vCPUs, RAM, and storage.
• Delivered multiple C-Level goals of cost reduction through vendor management consolidation and hardware migration reducing OpEx/CapEx by 10%.
• Promoted 6 associates and was nominated for 2011 CEO award.

Confidential, Hoffman Estates, IL

Team Manager

Responsibilities:

• Accountable for all Confidential corporate hardware/virtual Windows-based servers between 2 major data centers totalling 2500+ systems or 50,000+ internal customers. Managed geographically dispersed operational team of 8 engineers.
• Executed extensive collaboration with business and IT leadership in to understand service level commitments, budget development, contract negotiations, and cost/time/change management.
• Delivered an infrastructure strategy, roadmap, policies, and standards based on business plans and application requirements. Ensured capacity and performance planning for all technologies and systems.
• Ensured compliance with information security and internal audit (SOX, PCI, HIPAA), including the creation of business continuity, disaster recovery, and contingency plans for IT.
• Reduced supported systems by ~300 servers by consolidating technical infrastructures and underutilized systems over a 3-year timeframe.
• Managed the implementation and operation of a Citrix environment running Citrix (XenApp) which enabled 1,200 offshore support analysts to perform day to day business transactions for various Sears business units, resulting in $9.5MM EBITDA.
• Led company-wide implementation of Right Fax solution for enterprise level electronic faxing needs, yielding $1.5MM in cost savings on faxing equipment, maintenance, paper, etc.

Confidential, Chicago, IL

Team Leader

Responsibilities:

• Provided technical expertise and direction to a team of 8 systems engineers within a large-scale, distributed systems operations and architecture.
• Oversaw end-to-end management of data center migration, network services, and transformation delivery of all distributed systems from Hoffman Estates to Chicago co-located data center.
• Continuous collaboration with multi-vendor integration PMO including resource planning, risk management, quality assurance, and standardized processes; integrated operations layer such as disaster recovery, regulatory PCI compliance, SOX audit support, and change management.
• Architected and deployed the corporate VMware ESX infrastructure with capacity for 150 servers across multiple clusters.
• Improved the total cost of ownership for the business by the collapsing and virtualization of 200+ legacy and under-utilized hardware.

Confidential, Hoffman Estates, IL

Senior Systems Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Responsible for architecture, engineering, and 3 rd level support of 2,000+ enterprise servers and storage environment.
• Citrix Metaframe Farm and Microsoft Terminal Services including: planning, installation, administration for application publishing, user management, and load balancing.
• Established company-wide security and configuration standard for Active Directory domain controllers based on best practices for Windows and directory security.
• Developed and maintained a standardized server provisioning process based on HP Deployment Server.

Confidential, Itasca, IL

Programmer Analyst

Responsibilities:

• Designed, coded, tested, and implemented billing system for the Motorola Iridium satellite communication project.
• Performed unit tests of system interfaces for complex programs prior to release of code for quality assurance testing.
• Assisted in planning projects, assigning tasks, monitoring progress, and providing status reports to upper management.