Work Experience

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Regional IT Director (San Francisco, Redwood City and San Jose California)

IPG – Interpublic Group of Companies 11/2015 to Present

McCann World Group

 

Oversee all day to day IT operations for a federated multi tenement environment consisting of 14 advertising agencies and 550+ users. Analyze the business requirements of all agencies to determine their technology needs and implement new IT systems and policies. Ensure IT systems and people are effective and functioning within the limits of budget, time and specifications.

 

Operational Efficiencies

Utilizing the same cost savings efficiencies as established in the previous role at FCB West, I continued to approve upon these techniques, saving the agencies both time and money.

 

• Migrated the agency’s cost center from VoIP to SFB (Skype For Business) eliminating the costly PRI circuits and saving over $100, 000 per year in leased lines and $144, 000 in conference call costs.

• Decommissioned 26 EOL (End of Life) servers, pushed the agencies to cloud services and an on-prem SAN solution, saving the cost center over $386,000 in hardware replacement costs.

• Replaced the outdated fleet of leased printers with high capacity multifunction devices which enabled us to reduce the number of devices from 35 to 16, saving over $18, 000 annually.

 

Budgeting and Forecasting

• Prepare and manage annual capex budgets in excess of $1,000,000.00 for IT operational services and equipment across all agencies, each with unique budgetary requirements.

• Manage the annual opex budget of $500,000.00 for IT infrastructure for the cost center.

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Moves and Acquisitions

• Perform site survey’s and prepare due diligence reports to evaluate IT resources, unexpected expenses and risks. Look for hidden opportunities for cost savings and recommend next steps for IT integration into our environment.

• IT lead on over 20 agency remodels, restacks and relocations from infrastructure planning to completion.

 

Asset Management

• Conceived and established asset management practices and processes to track all assets from purchase and deployment to secured certified disposal at EOL.

• Managed inventory tracking and security, establishing tight asset control standards
  region-wide.

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Helpdesk Management

• Manage a support staff of 5 cross platform helpdesk technicians to support 3 locations in San Francisco, 1 on Redwood City and 1 in San Jose.

• Returned the agencies to the global helpdesk call center for tier 1 support, which allows my team to hyper focus on the agencies needs which drastically improves ticket response times, taking the team from a 40% end user satisfaction to over a 95% rating.

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West Coast IT Manager (San Francisco, Seattle, Venice, Visalia)

IPG – Interpublic Group of Companies 12/2010 to 11/2015

FCB West

 

Recruited by the CIO and Global Director of IT Operations to revamp the backend infrastructure and revitalize an under-performing IT department that supported 255 end users across multiple offices. Pursued the approach of consolidating critical operations, improving network efficiencies, standardizing delivery of IT services and establishing inter-departmental relationships.

 

Consolidation of Backend Services

• Decommissioned 10 dead or deprecated servers and replaced them all with a highly redundant and scalable VMware solution. With a $115,000.00 investment, this financially sound decision saw an immediate savings of over $100,000.00 in replacement hardware costs.

• The launch of the interactive team's dev and staging server consisted of a single HP 8000 desktop machine. In lieu of procuring multiple servers and storage, the obvious choice was to scale out to RackSpace for the dev and staging environment and Amazon AWS for online application development, all while saving $75,000.00 in hardware startup costs.

• Employed WebCargo and WireDrive cloud services which helped increase production by utilizing the agility and scalability of cloud services that provided end to end transfers between client and agency, along with secure online presentation for client review.

 

Network Efficiencies

• Procured and deployed Riverbed Steelheads between the San Francisco and Seattle offices to increase network throughput. Optimized traffic between San Francisco, Seattle and the corporate data center in Omaha providing a 86% reduction of data traffic, resulting in increased productivity.

• Centralized backup services in San Francisco utilizing Riverbed Steelheads which eliminated the costs of multiple backup servers, tape libraries, backup media and service agreements saving the agency $25,000 in hardware costs and $10,900 in annual media and maintenance fees.

 

Budgeting and Forecasting

• Prepared and managed an annual $500,000.00 forward plan for IT operational services and equipment. Included variables and complexities such as capex fluctuations and organizational changes.

• Managed an annual opex budget of $75,000.00 for IT infrastructure.

 

Asset Management

• Conceived and established asset management practices and processes to track all assets from purchase and deployment to secured certified disposal.

• Managed inventory tracking and security establishing tight asset control standards
  region-wide.

• Merged database into incident tracking system providing ability to monitor support trends. Identified root causes of suspicious issues and implemented resolutions that increased efficiency and customer satisfaction and lowered overall support costs.

 

Helpdesk Management

• Managed a support staff of 5 cross platform helpdesk technicians to support the offices in San Francisco, Seattle, SoCal and Visalia.

• Returned the once outsourced global helpdesk call center back to the local office which improved ticket response times from several days to the highest SLA (Service Level Agreement) in over 5 years with an average response time of 15 minutes per incident.

 

Senior System / Network Administrator

IPG – Interpublic Group of Companies 1999 – 12/2010

McCann World Group and FCB Worldwide

 

 

• Developed and executed a plan that deprecated multiple end of life servers and migrate their data to a HP EV8 SAN solution with seamless integration and minimal impact to users. By consolidating essential servers we were able to reduce energy, Management and I.T. support costs. This project has provided greater uptime, reliability, scalability, efficient storage management and a reduction in incremental equipment costs.

 

• Architected and executed several major segmentation projects which increased overall throughput allowing more efficient passing of extremely large amounts of data resulting in a boost of efficiency which enabled targeted deadlines to be met and allowed clients around the world more reliable connectivity to assets.

 

• Drove the project of building a high availability Bay Area MAN and WLAN that supported 700+ users, which helped cut the operational expenses of the main data center by doing a share of cost charge back to the individual offices. The gained cost savings allowed for increased bandwidth and redundancy which provided fail-over for disaster recovery,

 

• Helped reduce our carbon footprint by migrating multiple systems running on deprecated high energy consuming servers to   a virtual environment. I essentially eliminated the need for 8 servers and consolidated their services to 2 VMware ESXi hosts. I also created a development and staging environment consisting of 8 virtual machines spread across 2 host saving the company approximately $48,000 in hardware costs.

 

• Work with Facilities, contactors and agency leads to determine I.T. needs for moves, expansions and cold shell build- outs. Specify and purchase network devices, servers and UPS solutions all while keeping to a strict timeline.

 

• Technical lead on multiple expansion projects implementing VoIP and high speed data networks over Opteman circuits which ultimately saved the company at least 60% of the cost of installing individual routers, circuits and standalone PBX systems. This has also provided us the continued ability to track COS for remote locations on a single call accounting system.

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Accomplishments

Was the technical lead for a 1.6 million dollar cold shell build out to relocate the San Francisco FCB West office to a new state of the art facility. Integrated matrix switch controlled AV solutions for conference rooms, open spaces and a multiplexed zero bezel video wall to greet clients as they enter the new space. Specified, procured, installed and configured the new server / network infrastructure using redundant  HP cores for VMware, Dell EqualLogic SAN storage, redundant cisco 4500 network cores and 3850x POE switches. The addition of three 6kva APC Symertas along with expansion cabinets provide 1.5 hours runtime for all server, switches, WAPS and IP phones to ensure continued production during a power outage.