Career
When I was five, my Dad got a BBC B Micro computer with a cassette deck. I wanted nothing more than to be a computer programmer.
It sort of went to plan.
Verint
Vice President, Cloud and AI
January 2020 – May 2026 · London
I was hired as part of the EMEA leadership team to accomplish one thing - make cloud go faster. Historically, Verint were an on-premise software company; deals were made up of a large software component paid and recognised on day one, with services to help you implement your system and a lower, recurring maintenance and support charge. The shift to cloud and SaaS, and a recurring revenue model, was underway when I arrived. It was running slower than the market wanted.
I worked across finance, sales, pre-sales, customer success, professional services, technical support, billing, legal and compliance in EMEA to assess their maturity on the journey to SaaS and understand what was holding them back. I built and ran a programme of change across the region, working with the leaders and teams in each area and providing what they needed; that might be nothing more than guidance and expertise, collateral, training courses, new processes or governance structures, and where needed I built new capability. For example:
- I built and then ran the SaaS consumption billing team in EMEA until I left in 2026.
- I wrote the first version of the Cloud Service Description: a 45-page sales document that described the service rather than the applications inside it - where it was hosted, RPO and RTO targets, BCDR, availability targets, compliance certifications, security standards, service reporting. Being able to explain the service was key to unsticking SaaS business; it was adopted and maintained globally.
- I led cloud technical pre-sales in the region for six years, working on the most demanding and complex deals on our books. Where we knew our standard service wouldn’t meet a customer’s requirements I was on the deal personally, working with our global teams on how to adapt the service safely and let the deal move ahead.
- My remit grew in 2023 to include our AI offerings, such as the Verint Bots. Much like cloud, these had a different sales motion, new technologies underneath, and new questions in pre-sales.
By late 2024 the business had more than matured: the teams in EMEA could work with little help from me and my work was fast approaching finished. For the rest of 2024 and much of 2025 I was dedicated to one of the largest deals our region had done, which needed a completely bespoke design - not just the service stack but a full cloud instance and nearly 30 additional employees to service it. It was well beyond anything I’d seen for complexity since the multi-tower days of Capgemini.
Verint changed the way it measured cloud and recurring revenue during this period, but I can safely say that in 2020 SaaS revenue made up 26% of the business, and by 2025 our recurring revenue as a percentage of our software revenue (the newer metric) was nearly 90%.
Verint was acquired by Thoma Bravo in late 2025 and merged into Calabrio in early 2026.
Capgemini
Global Director, Cloud Solution Architecture
September 2018 – January 2020 · London
I was hired to build the global Cloud Solution Architecture function inside Capgemini Infrastructure Services - CIS, 20,000 of the near quarter of a million people Capgemini employed at the time. The global team sat across the CIS country units, solutioning the cloud managed service that in-country architects attached to their transformation deals - and where a region’s maturity or capacity needed it, my team could solution the whole cloud component: the services transformation, and then the managed service run on top. I was also the point of sign-off and control on our cloud services deals, to make sure what we sold could be built, supported, and had the right financial treatment.
- I grew the team from six (UK and India) to eighteen across the regions, and defined the solutioning standards and processes for the cloud managed service.
- My team worked the largest deals in the pipeline, including the best part of six months embedded in a €500m multi-tower transformation for a German steel manufacturer.
- With the SVP Legal and the Head of Enterprise Architecture I took the offering on the road: two days of face-to-face training in each region so they could sell it better - France, the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, India and the US, with the other regions online.
Rackspace
Head of Azure Support and Operations
February 2016 – September 2018 · London
Rackspace had built a successful AWS practice and needed its Azure twin. I was hired to build the EMEA Support and Operations (everything post-sale) arm of the new Azure business. I was the second person into this unit which had a single customer in pilot at the time. Over two and a half years we grew it from that standing start to a high-double-digit book of enterprise customers:
- I built and scaled three functions - technical support, customer onboarding and customer success - to a team of more than twenty, handing customer success to a dedicated manager in mid-2017 as we scaled; revenue grew to well over £1m recurring revenue a month.
- I owned cost-to-serve (CtS): this number was our staffing costs as a percentage of the support revenue our team managed. Starting at over 350%, my target for exit into the mainstream business was 30%. When I left in 2018 we were crossing the 40% mark and were ahead of plan for the three-year incubation business case.
- I delivered the key initiatives, support automation above all, to support scale, bring the CtS number down and improve our customer service.
- I worked the field alongside sales, partnered with the US on the development of the offering, and worked closely with Microsoft as we built our CSP reseller status and channel revenue.
Technical Team Manager
October 2012 – February 2016 · London
I led several technical teams delivering managed-hosting support: first a Microsoft SMB team and once established was parachuted into a Linux team having issues to fix it, and finally took on a small cross-functional technical team focussed on a differentiated service for our highest-value customers. The teams I ran consistently delivered at the upper end of NPS across the floor, had amongst the lowest staff attrition, had team members performing well, winning awards and progressing. I was extremely fortunate that some of the best people I worked with chose to follow me to the cross-functional team, and again into the Azure team when I moved on. In 2015, I led teams taking five national awards across the UK Customer Experience Awards and the UK Employee Experience Awards - including Team of the Year.
The Carphone Warehouse
Operations Manager, Microsoft
2010 – September 2012 · London
When Carphone Warehouse outsourced its 130-person infrastructure function to IBM, I was one of seven people retained to own the service back to the business. I owned the Microsoft portion of the service, managing it through the transition to IBM and then offshore to India, and governing it through IBM - 900+ servers (VMware, AD, Exchange) supporting nearly 20,000 users across UK and European offices and stores. I also owned the Microsoft operational roadmap and budget; the most significant accomplishment here (and a multi-year project) was designing, securing a multi-million-pound budget for, and then driving a complete Windows and Office 2010 refresh with associated back-end infrastructure upgrade across thousands of desktops, and the renegotiation of our Microsoft Enterprise Agreement that went with it.
Microsoft Engineering Manager
November 2007 – 2010 · London
I rebuilt the Microsoft Engineering function from one to six (a mix of permanent and contract resource) now as its manager, owned the Microsoft operational roadmap, secured funding for work we needed to get done, and through my team delivered numerous Microsoft, Citrix and VMware projects across an estate of over 900 servers.
Senior Microsoft Engineer
June 2006 – November 2007 · London
I joined in mid-2006 as a Senior Microsoft Engineer to work on some of the more complex projects in the company; including an Exchange 2003 migration, Altiris implementation and development and rollout of upgrades to the Windows XP Embedded image running on over 15,000 tills. This was a small team, and as the business reorganised, it shrank from four to just me.
Geest
Technical Delivery Analyst (Levels 1–3)
Mid-2000 – mid-2006 · Spalding, Lincolnshire
I joined Geest as an L1 Technical Delivery Analyst working on the Helpdesk. Over six years at this FTSE 250 food business, I worked up through the helpdesk first, providing remote support across 28 sites in the UK and Europe; promoted to the desktop team in 2002, doing deskside support and the hands-on end of project rollouts; promoted again to 3rd Line Server Support in 2004, delivering project implementations including the Active Directory and Exchange migrations. Alongside the day job: a part-time degree, and a self-funded MCSE and CCNA.
Pilgrim Hospital, Boston
IT Helpdesk & 2nd Line Support
1999 – 2000 · Boston, Lincolnshire
This was my first full-time job in IT; a 12-month contract with the NHS in Lincolnshire as we approached Y2K and as the Lincolnshire Health Trusts merged. I was one of a two-person helpdesk team delivering phone and deskside support.
