What I do for a living

I've been in telecommunications all my life, starting with Post Office Telecommunications in Southend, and staying with the company as it went through the change to BT. I have planned networks, trained staff, managed a customer service team, undertaken marketing and product management responsibilities and sold to all sizes of business customer. I have covered voice, telex, data, video, mobile (in nearly all its guises) and CPE. I have worked in national, local and international.

I spent 3 years with Mitsubishi Corporation where I was their UK telecoms and Internet expert. This was followed by 18 months at Telewest. I joined as a Major Account Manager (selling to large business customers, but was soon appointed as Internet specialist). Telewest was much maligned - especially for its residential service, and justifiably so. That's getting better now, but mud sticks! The business side wasn't perfect, but was certainly more professional than the residential side, but still suffered from the residential bad name. It didn't help when the Chief Executive (Tony Illsley) introduced an ethos of "One Telewest"!

I was then headhunted for a position in INS - Internet Network Services. It's a fairly young company that has grown in size and quality and is now number 2 in the UK for provision of Internet connections to business. The INS difference is that you get the bandwidth and the security of service. The network is built to military spec and has never been down. It has been described as the Rolls Royce of ISPs. To prove how good it is, you should see the 'Virtual Telepresence' demonstration. this is full quality videoconferencing over the internet. Other ISPs contend their bandwidth, so they can't give this sort of service. In July 1999 INS was bought by Cable & Wireless to give this international giant some Internet and IP skills. It's strange really, because a few years ago, it was from one of the founders of INS that I discovered how the Internet worked! I was recruited to work in a sales capacity looking after our European sales partners.

However, integration with Cable & Wireless meant a move. INS was put into the division that serves the UK market, not Europe. So my European customers had to go to another division. I was 'integrated' with the rest of my team into C&W's UK and Ireland. I now work as a relationship manager with some key alliances.

As you can see, I've got quite a few T-Shirts!