nICHOLAS j. cOLLIER

FLAT 5, 206 SHEEN ROAD, RICHMOND, TW10 5AN

TEL: 0208 332 0945 (HOME)   07533 275 899 (MOBILE)

EMAIL: nick@POLAR-IT.CO.UK

Website: http://WWW.POLAR-IT.CO.UK

 

To download in MS Word 2003 format: cv1.doc

For CV updates: http://www.nick-cv.com

 

 

PERSONAL DETAILS

               

Date of Birth:                         15th July 1974

Nationality:                            British / United States

Marital Status:                        Single

 

 

QUALIFICATIONS / CERTIFICATIONS

 

ITIL Managers Service Support Exam

(ITIL Managers Service Delivery, course attended only, exam to be completed)

ITIL Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management

Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, Windows 2000

Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, Windows NT4

Cisco Certified Network Associate

CompTIA A+ Certification

 

‘A’-Levels (Bloxham School, Banbury, 1990-1992)

Economics, Mathematics, Physics, General Studies

 

 

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SKILLS

 

 

Desktop hardware

HP / Compaq, Dell, IBM desktops and laptops

Server Hardware

HP/Compaq Proliant server, HP Blade (basic level), Dell Server, SGI web server, IBM e-server, Colalt Raq, Sun servers

RAID / Storage

HP SmartArray, Mylex RAID controllers, IBM ServeRAID, AMI Megaraid, EMC Storage Area Network (basic level), Microsoft RAID, HP Autoloader tape libraries

Other hardware

Alteon Ace Director 3 web load balancing (basic level)

Operating Systems

DOS, Windows 3.1/95/98/ME/XP/NT4 workstation & server/2000 Professional & Server/2003 Server, Unix (basic level), Linux (basic level), VMWare ESX Server

Microsoft Desktop Products

MS Office 95/ 97/ 2000/ 2003/ 2007, MS Visio, MS Project

Microsoft Server Products

Exchange Server 5.5/ 2000/ 2003, Internet Information Server (IIS) 4/5/6, Proxy Server, Microsoft Operations Manager 2000/ 2005, Windows Software Update Services, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, Sharepoint

Active Directory (Windows 2000/ 2003 server)

Active Directory Domain structure i.e. Forests, Trees, Parent/ Child domains, sites. Integration of Microsoft Server Products with Active Directory e.g. Exchange Server, SQL, MOM, DNS Server.  Migrating / upgrading NT4 networks to Windows 2000/ 2003 Active Directory networks, Remote Installation Service (RIS), DHCP , WINS, RRAS, Terminal Server, Microsoft Clustering.

Databases

SQL Server 7/ 2000,/ 2005 Access 2000 with Visual Basic

Programming

HTML, ASP, Visual basic, ODBC, Javascript (basic level), Visual Studio 6/.NET

Scripting

Windows Scripting Host/ Vbscript, Batch files e.g. Frequently use scripting to automate tasks e.g. application/ patch deployment, to survey a large quantities of computers  for applications,Windows services, registry conditions etc.

Networking/ Transport/ Application Protocols

Internet Protocol (IP), RIP, OSPF, IGRP, EIGRP, Ethernet, OSI , NetBEUI , TCP/IP: FTP, SMTP, ICMP, ARP, SSL, SSH, SMTP

Networking products

Wireless Lan (Apple Airport), Checkpoint Firewall-1 on Windows & Nokia IP330 box, Cisco routers & switches, Leased lines, ADSL, Windows VPN, Nokia VPN-1,

Security

Microsoft domain security, IP packet filtering, Firewalls, DMZ, VPN

Web software

Webtrends, Authentix

LAN admin software

Update Expert (patching),  WhatsUp Gold (monitoring)

Backup software

Veritas Backup Exec, Veritas NetBackup, Brightstore Arcserve

Anti Virus/ Anti Spyware software

McAfee Antivirus, McAfee E-Policy Orchestrator (EPO), Norton Antivirus, Trend Antivirus, Microsoft Anti Spyware, Adware

Graphics

Paintshop Pro (basic level), Photoshop (basic level), Adobe Acrobat Writer

Accounting/ Software

Balance sheets, purchase/ sales ledger, End of year accounts etc. Sage, Sun Accounts, Pegasus

Investment Banking

Reuters, Bloomberg, Securities trading, settlements, stock portfolio management/ valuation, price feeds, reconciliations. Understanding of FX, equities, bonds, futures, options markets.

Telephony

Voice Over Internet Protocol VOIP (Basic Level), SIP, Asterisk Server, Avaya phone switches

Other

IT Service Management, ITIL, documentation, technical architect

 

 

EMPLOYMENT HISTORY

 

Credit Suisse                                                                                                                        November 2008 – Present

Global Web Services/ Integration Technologies                                                                        

Assistant Vice President

                               

·  The department manages web based applications e.g. live data applications for the banks dealing rooms, SharePoint systems for department information bases. The department is based in 3 geographical regions and uses a global support structure largely based in Singapore.

·  Management a 3rd line support and application integration team

·  To optimise and improve the Windows/ IIS web infrastructure

·  To supervise changes to applications and the infrastructure

·  To manage migrations of applications and infrastructure

·  To act as the final point of escalation for incidents and to coordinate incident management between various teams and regions

·  To own major incidents and problems

·  Technical reporting

·  To work with the various businesses e.g. fixed income, equities and derivatives to establish their application platform requirements and progress application deployments.

·  To ensure availability and reliability of systems e.g. using fault tolerant, resilient systems

·  Maintain the inventory for the Windows web application portfolio

·  Writing custom code e.g. for reporting tasks, task automation and status notification.

 

 

IMG Media                                                                                                                          January 2007 – October 2008

Digital  Media Division                                                                                                                    

Infrastructure Manager

                               

·  Management of the infrastructure (Microsoft, Cisco and Sun based), high availability live web hosting environment, the software development environment, architecture of solutions and IT service management. This role was for the digital media section of IMG and encompasses aspects that would often be split into various roles.

·  To manage a team of network/ server engineers that were provided by an outsource company.

·  To manage procurement of infrastructure requirements.

·  To develop, optimise and maintain service management processes e.g. Incident management, problem management, change management, release management and capacity management.

·  To maintain a stable and highly available environment and to ensure continuity of business by ensuring best practises.

·  To manage the relationships with outsource partners and to monitor quality of service, SLA compliance rates and the costs in relation to market value.

·  Investigation of infrastructure cost reduction exercises and to increase value in the infrastructure.

·  To produce technical reports and to provide business process documentation with regards to infrastructure matters.

·  Escalation management and to act as the final point of escalation for issues which cannot be resolved by support personnel, developers, project managers or outsource partners.

·  To architect solutions for the development, live infrastructure and customer projects i.e. Networks, subnets, security, server types, load balancing, routing etc. Project management of or to provide oversight on infrastructure change projects and customer projects. To liaise with project managers to facilitate in house and customer projects i.e. the development process, testing, go live, hosting. Providing coordinating/ providing input on the various actions required to go live e.g. Choice of hardware platform, software platform, .NET environment, IP routing/ switching, DNS entries, redirection, host headers, monitoring, backups, web caching, load balancing, security etc.

·  To manage the development environment i.e. Development, test, staging and live. Architected & managed a project to migrated developers from Visual Source Safe to Team Foundation Suite.

·  Architected and managed a project to virtualise the test and staging environments using HP Blade servers.

·  To provide support to developers, webmasters and project managers for technical issues (when an alternate resource is not available).

 

 

Scottish and Southern Energy                                                                                          August 2006 – December 2006

Microsoft Server Team

Windows Consultant (Contract)

 

·  The team supported the Windows servers for SSE . The company has a Windows 2003 Active Directory domain (Exchange 2003 Mail servers/ Microsoft Operations Manager 2005/ SQL 2000 Database servers/ Application servers/ File and print servers etc.) 

·  Performed general maintenance tasks e.g. break fixes, patching, upgrades, monitoring etc.

·  Wrote/ modified Vbscripts to automate various tasks eg. To read data from an Excel spreadsheet for AD user account creation, to move data via. FTP.

·  Rolled out 4 E-commerce websites eg. http://www.thesouthernshop.co.uk into test and live environments. The websites use an IIS6/ SQL 2000/ MS Commerce Server 2005 infrastructure. The ASP .NET code development was outsourced to a company in India.

·  Implemented a monthly reboot script on all Windows servers subject to approval by the application contacts/ teams.  

 

 

Rolls Royce (outsourcing company Data Systems & Solutions)                               February 2006 – May 2006

Network Operations Centre

Network Engineer (Contract)

 

·  The team supported the Window server and network infrastructure for Rolls Royce Aircraft Monitoring division . The company has a Windows 2003 Active Directory domain (Exchange 2003 Mail servers/ Microsoft Operations Manager 2005/ SQL 2000 Database servers/ Application servers/ File and print servers etc.) and Cisco routers and switches. 

·  Performed general maintenance tasks e.g. break fixes, patching, upgrades, monitoring etc. Troubleshooted problems with the Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 infrastructure.

·  Built servers which were handed over to application teams

·  Tested various domain Anti-virus products in order to assist decision making.

·  Installed Microsoft Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005.

·  Assisted in building an HP Blade enclose and blade servers

 

 

Silverscreen DVD Ltd.                                                                                                       September 2005 – January 2006

Acting Infrastructure Manager (Contract)

 

·  I performed this role as a contractor while the company was in the process of recruiting a permanent Infrastructure Manager.

·  The position involved managing the Infrastructure for Silverscreen. The company has a head office with around 60 staff and around 70 stores.

·  The computer infrastructure included a Windows 2000 Active Directory domain, Windows XP workstations, non domain computers & network tills in stores

·  The head office network was a 10/100/1Gb switched network with a Cisco 2600 series router connected to a 2Mb serial line. ADSL links with VPN tunnels were used to connect stores to head office by means of  VPN tunnels. Troubleshooted layer 2 or 3 networking problems and set up routers for new stores. Created a Layer 2 access list in head office on the main switch.

·  Administered McAfee E-Policy Orchestrate (EPO) 3.6 and Wsus.

·  Implemented a tape backup system using an HP Surestore Ultrium3 tape autoloader and Arcserve.

·  Wrote Vbscripts to perform maintenance and monitoring tasks e.g. Checking disk space, copying databases, checking database copy, bulk copying files to stores, ping testing, checking pst file sizes etc.

·  Server room reorganisation; migrated fileserver, EPO server, Wsus server and Backup server from a domain controller which was performing all of these roles to separate servers.

·  Produced documentation on most aspects of the infrastructure

·  Assisted with processing data in Excel spreadsheets, importing and exporting through CSV files, writing Excel macros.

 

 

SAIC                                                                                                                      May 2005 – August 2005

Infrastructure Team

Systems Consultant (Contract)

 

·  The team supported the SAIC Europe Windows 2003 Active Directory domain (Domain Controllers/ Mail servers/ Database servers/ Application servers/ File and print servers etc.)

·  The main focus of my role was to architect and project manage the implementation of a server monitoring system using Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. This included the full life cycle of the project from planning, design, implementation to customising the monitoring requirements eg. alert filtering. The monitoring system Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 used multiple MOM servers across multiple sites.

·  Designed and implemented an automated desktop patching system using Windows Software Update Services (Wsus) with multiple Wsus servers across multiple sites. Policies were controlled by means of Active Directory GPO’s. Worked with the client to establish their desktop patching needs/ desired policies and configured Wsus accordingly.

·  Implemented NTP Quota & File Sentinel software to control the use of fileserver disk space/ permissible file types of desktop users.

·  Produced documentation of Infrastructure servers on Physical, Network, Application layers as well as Support and Backup information.

 

 

Employment prior to May 2005

 

In 1992 I started working as a purchase ledger clerk in accounts departments as a contractor. I then moved to the banking sector where I performed purchase ledger, share issue and trade reconciliation work. By 1996, this led to contracts in trade settlements departments with Deutsche Bank, Barings Bank, Lombard Odier,  Dresdner Kleinwort Benson and Tokyo Mitsubishi. The work included:

 

·  Maintaining client portfolios which composed of equities, bonds and cash & correcting problems

·  Maintaining in house databases with securities and trade data, maintaining price data feeds. Liaison with other institutions which hold securities data e.g. Crest, London Stock Exchange in order to resolve conflicting information

·  Resolving ‘failed trades’ through an understanding of the front office/ back office trade life cycle 

·  Used systems such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Crest, Euroclear, Swift, London Stock Exchange daily updates

·  Using Excel to macro level to manage and process trade data, convert to other formats or for reporting

·  An understanding of the instruments traded e.g. equities, bonds, options, swaps, futures.

 

In 1999 I decided to move into information technology and I acquired the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer qualification. To get experience I worked for 18 months as a systems administrator for a small internet company in Manchester called Wax Digital. I then started contracting and carried out a wide range of contracts in internet technologies, Wintel engineering, and network infrastructure in the public sector, banking and commerce.