A little about me
I started out in Wisconsin, born into a blue-collar construction family with some roots in the south. These men, hardworking, honest, ethical all made a huge impression and taught me that no matter what the difficulties or challenges, the job must be completed, safely and correctly. At a young age my family (me with them of course) moved to the south, Tennessee to be exact where we lived for a few more years. Next on the move list was beautiful, sunny Southern California. In California I completed my schooling and began my adult life.
Being born into a construction family as one would think, I began my working life in that same profession. After obtaining a state contractor license I started Kreger Construction and continued building custom homes, restaurants and commercial buildings. It was in that business that I became enthralled with technology, computers, networking, databases, everything. With this newfound passion, I returned to school to gain the necessary knowledge and training to allow me to make a successful transition in chosen career. I haven’t looked back.
My work life
Currently I assist small to mid sized businesses with in developing, aligning and getting the most business value out of their IT investments and teams.
Prior to this, I held the position of CTO (Chief Technology Officer) at Angel of The Winds Casino in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. As the highest-ranking IT team member, I proudly led the various IT teams driving process improvements, standards, enhancing cyber security and transforming IT into a productive business partner.
Before heading up to the PNW I had the honor of leading IT teams in Infrastructure, Systems Engineering, End Point Engineering, Network Engineering, Network Operations, Database, and application support for Paul Hastings, Llp., a leading global law firm based in Los Angeles, Ca.
Those were not my only leadership roles, at San Manuel Band of Mission Indians I led a team of 88 for sovereign Tribe providing all the same public services to tribal members such as fire services, building planning, educational in addition to business holdings. One of the businesses is a very active casino that is All Thrill. In fact, the San Manuel Casino is the busiest casino in Southern California and in the Top 5 in the United States.
Prior to joining the All-Thrill team at SMBMI I was the Director of SaaS Operations for SDL, plc, based in Maidenhead, UK. SDL has a global presence providing localization, translation and content management services for Fortune 100 companies worldwide. With over 4 petabytes of language data the systems could translate in over 1000 language sets.
I arrived at SDL coming from Ovesee.net where I led teams of systems, networking, NOC, data center operations, database, application support, service desk as the Director of IT. Oversee.Net was the leader in domain monetization serving up over 60 million unique pages per day covering over 10 million domain names which were all transitive by nature. During my time at Oversee they expanded into comparison shopping (shopwiki.com), travel services (lowfares.com), and consumer credit/lead generation (creditcards.org). Oversee has since divested itself of the domaining business and is focused on the compare and lead generation aspects.
Earlier, I was at Sparebackup and was their IT Director. Sparebackup provided on-line backup services using a proprietary client-side application. This SaaS solution was built on Microsoft platforms (Windows Server, Microsoft SQL) with the predominant customer base in Europe. At the time, Spare’s data centers were located in the US with a fairly large sized storage implementation (as one might think). I have also worked at California State Automobile Association and Caremark.
Technology wise, I use a Mac as my personal solution, yet this site is running on Linux (Ubuntu) and Apache using the cloud for distribution (CloudFlare) and DNS. I have worked in AIX, OVMS, HPUX, Linux, and Windows. I am experienced and knowledgeable in; Networking, Storage, Systems architecture, IT security, data centers and IT operations (plan, build, run) and the managing support for all of these as well.