Rehan O'Grady

Name:

Rehan O’Grady

Academia

Publications:

Sep ’04 – Present

Institution:

IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

Sep ’95 – Jun ’99

Institution:

Edinburgh University, UK

Sep ’89 – Jun ’94

Institution:

St Paul’s School, London

Business

Nov ’03 – May ’04

Company:

Willis Ltd, London

This was a six month consultancy role. Willis Ltd is a global insurance broker. I project managed the transfer of several of their business processes from the UK to India. In the UK this meant working with management to understand the nature of the work involved as well as the HR and IT requirements. In India I oversaw the setting up of teams to take on the new work. I then managed the handover of work from the British teams to the Indian teams.

I also made major contributions to two Human Resources projects which affected the whole of Willis’ Indian subsidiary. I headed up a project to develop a soft skills (customer service, cultural awareness, etc) training course for the Indian employees – both course structure and materials. The second project was to design from scratch and then implement a new career and pay structure for the employees of the Indian organisation.

This job offered me the opportunity to gain perspective beyond the software industry.  I gained experience of the financial services sector, management, and cross cultural working.  Living in India had also been a goal of mine for some time.

Aug ’02 – Jan ’03

Company:

NetFM Ltd, London

I was recruited for this position by Dr. David Herring, my former manager at Micromuse. Dr. Herring left Micromuse to found NetFM, a company specializing in business software for mobile devices. He hired me on a six month consultancy project to kick-start NetFM’s mobile application development program.

Over the course of the project I built the development platform which now serves as the base for all NetFM’s mobile applications. This involved setting up the code repository, then writing code to send and receive text messages as well as to store and receive data from the back end database. The project also entailed writing the building blocks and early design of the web based user interface. (PHP, Perl, MySql, GSM/SMS, X.25, CVS). I also came up with the initial software design for NetFM’s MobileManager product (UML).

Aug ’99 – Aug ’02

Company:

Micromuse Ltd, London

I was recruited by Dr. David Herring who had previously been my mentor at Micromuse during my university internship. I became a key member of the Micromuse’s research and development team which produced (thought up, designed and implemented) a number of products in the ‘Netcool’ network management software suite for large corporations. The products we introduced were critical in transforming Micromuse from a bit player in the hardware (SUN Microsystems) reseller market to a multi billion dollar company listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Micromuse has since been purchased by IBM, who have maintained the ‘Netcool’ branding.

I played a core role in the development of two distinct product groups. The first, known as Usage Service Monitors (USMs), provides analysis of the usage levels of network services. One of the design papers I wrote – on how operators of large scale networks could receive early warning of service degradation through the automated detection of abnormal patterns in service usage – resulted in a US patent. The implementation of the USMs involved writing engines which measured, aggregated and analysed the usage of a variety of internet services (C, C++, Java, Solaris, Linux, Cisco/Netflow, CheckPoint Firewall-1, HTTP, DNS, RADIUS, FTP, POP, SMTP, NTP). These engines integrated with the Oracle database (ODBC, JDBC). I was awarded 7500 Micromuse stock options for my pioneering work on the USMs.

The second product group were the Internet Service Monitors (ISMs). Their function was to help companies ensure their network services were always available. To that end I wrote code which repeatedly accessed network services with synthetic transactions and then reported on the performance and availability of these services (C, XML configuration). I was involved in designing and implementing the web based user interfaces for both the USMs and ISMs. (J2SE 1.3, Jetty Web Server, Freemarker templating engine).

I also worked closely with Micromuse’s customers, representing the team in numerous high level presentations and explaining to clients how our technology worked and how it could benefit their businesses. Clients with whom I dealt included The Bank of China in Beijing and AOL/Time Warner in Washington DC – both now major users of Netcool technology.

Jun ’96 – Oct ’96

Company:

Micromuse Ltd, London

May ’95 – Jun ’95

Institution:

Stanislas School, Paris

Jan ’95 – Apr ’95

Company:

Siemens AG, Karlsruhe, Germany

Oct ’94 – Dec ’94

Company:

Bauland GmbH , Munich, Germany

Technologies

Platforms:

Languages:

Other:

Languages

Mother Tongue:

Fluent:

Moderate:

Personal Interests

References