I have been working with virtualization technologies since the mid-nineties, when I cut my teeth on Insignia NTrigue, a technology that was acquired by Citrix in January 1998.

I then went on to roll out the world's first Terminal Server implementation based on Windows 2000, which we went live with in 1999.

A proud moment was when the project received a mention in one of Steve Ballmer's keynotes during the launch of Windows 2000.

Since then, I got the bug, and have been evangelising about the benefits of virtualisation in its various guises ever since!

In January 2006 I got involved with RES, as the RES product specialist at CDG, drawn in by the potential of Workspace Virtualisation (separating the user from a specific device), one of the pain points I had run into myself on previous projects.

I found the top down approach appealing: deal with the User first and foremost, and everything else will follow with less impact and no downtime, a concept that is even more important today with the advent of hosted virtual desktops and complex operating system migrations.

A year later, in January 2007, I joined RES directly, starting in Pre-Sales, where it was all hands to the pump: getting a few good deals under our belt, building a skilled channel and establishing the RES brand in the UK against some tough competition. A couple of years later I moved into Product Management, an area I'd worked in before and genuinely enjoy for its variety. As a field-based PM I was on the road a lot, presenting the RES vision and bringing customer requirements back to our Requirements Engineers and R&D team, making sure what we built actually fitted what customers needed.

In December 2011, Bob Janssen, the founder of RES, asked me to join the CTO Office. A genuinely proud moment, and one of the most important of my career.

I love the continual challenge that comes from customers on a daily basis. Every day in Product Management is different from the last.

RES was acquired by Ivanti in July 2017. In the years that followed I focused on two things in particular: Neurons, Ivanti's cloud-based automation platform with its machine learning bots and Smart Advisors that could spot and fix problems before a user even noticed them, and integrating our Automation product into Ivanti's IT Asset Management, Endpoint Security and Service Management lines, which opened up cross-sell into Ivanti's then 45,000-strong customer base. I'm proud of the part I played in building something the founder, three funding rounds and eventually Clearlake Capital all believed in enough to buy.

In 2018 I moved to SPECTRAMI, a specialist security and cloud distributor, as their UK representative, brought in to extend an already successful Middle East business into a new region. Within six months I'd signed seven new vendors and built a strong pipeline, before drifting back to my Product Management roots to help design and build AmiViz, a cloud-based marketplace that let resellers purchase, license and manage multiple vendor products in one place. It gave Spectrami a genuine international presence without the overhead of opening legal entities in every new country.

From 2021 I spent a year at Lead Forensics, building the roadmap for Lead Forensics Enterprise, a sister product for larger businesses whose needs weren't being met by the core SME-focused offering. We designed a platform that identified website visitors, matched them against lead criteria, and fed them straight into a customer's CRM, with the right salesperson notified and tracking underway before they'd even picked up the phone.

Since 2022 I've been Director of Product Management at Exclaimer, where I specialise in the Channel. Exclaimer had 22,000 active subscriptions when I joined; we're now past 85,000, putting a signature on the bottom of an email roughly 635 times a second, somewhere in the region of 1.7 billion a month. My job was to build a proper Product Management function from the ground up: structured ideation, customer and prospect interviews, and a disciplined approach to weighing development effort against customer value, alongside taking the product itself through several rounds of design refresh and simplification. It's paid off. Revenue has grown from £29m to £75m over that period, customer retention sits at 96%, and in 2024 we won the UK Tech Awards' Growth Business of the Year. Around 60% of Exclaimer's business now comes through the Channel: distributors, resellers, and our newly launched MSP programme. half direct, and it's that Channel side I focus on today.

Technology moves so quickly, it certainly keeps life interesting!