George Shanks, CEO
George has over 25 years’ experience building successful companies.
Prior to joining dezineforce, George was CEO of Jacobs Rimell, a UK-based software company serving the communications sector. Arriving in 2003 with the company in serious decline, George led its recovery and growth, culminating in a successful sale to Amdocs in April 2008.
Originally a chartered civil engineer, George entered the IT sector in 1981 with ICL followed by a decade at Oracle UK where as Regional Director, he created and led the communications business unit to establish database dominance in the sector for Oracle. In 1998 he co-founded Rubus, an Internet consultancy, and helped the company grow from initial start-up to over 300 people in just over two years before taking up the position of Vice President, EMEA at Inktomi Corporation.
George holds an honours degree in civil engineering from the University of Bristol.
Trevor Cooper-Chadwick, VP Engineering
Trevor has considerable experience having led development and infrastructure teams as CTO of Orebus, Technical Director of Global Crossing and as a senior manager for Kvaerner. In his most recent role he has been leading the development of large scale grid based computing solutions at the Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing. This builds on a history of internet based developments including B2B portals, Tier 1 internet services infrastructures and, for Racal Telecom, a complete ISP hosting and service infrastructure.
Trevor holds an honours degree in mathematics from the University of Southampton.
Prof Simon Cox, Chief Scientist
Simon is a Professor of Computational Methods and director of the Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing at the University of Southampton, working with Microsoft on its future tools, technologies and platforms in the high performance computing arena. He has collaborations with BAE Systems, Microsoft, Rolls-Royce, and Airbus. He has published over 120 papers and is a regular conference speaker. He has been awarded Microsoft ‘Most Valuable Professional’ status as a Windows Server System Infrastructure Architect annually since 2003. He holds a Ph.D. in Electronics and Computer Science from the University of Southampton.
Richard Harding, VP Technical Services
Richard has held senior positions in both engineering consultancy and software development over the last 8 years.
As Senior Consulting Engineer, based within the University of Southampton's consultancy group, he provided a range of innovative engineering solutions for a broad range of clients including Rolls Royce. In his previous roles, Richard architected and delivered web based engineering applications exploiting distributed computing technologies for Lloyd's Register and developed naval architectural software used by UK MoD and major defence contractors to support the operation of the UK's naval fleet and for the development of new concept designs.
Richard holds a bachelors degree in Ship Science from the University of Southampton.
Joe Frost, VP Marketing & Alliances
Joe Frost joined dezineforce in February 2010, bringing to dezineforce his extensive experience in technology strategy and marketing.
Prior to joining dezineforce, Joe spent the past two years with Psytechnics as Vice President Marketing and Alliances, managing all aspects of marketing, product management, technology and reseller alliances and partnerships.
Joe has spent his entire career in the IT industry starting as a field support engineer for mainframes and enterprise networking, evolving to network consulting and to product management and full spectrum marketing.
Joe brings a wealth of experience in online and offline technology marketing, partner development and product management to dezineforce through his roles at Psytechnics, Digital Equipment, 3Com, Cisco Systems, Inktomi, Peregrine Systems and JacobsRimell.
Peter Williams, CTO
Peter joined dezineforce from Microsoft Corporation where he held a number of technical and managerial roles. Most recently he held the position of Senior Solutions Architect within the UK practice where he led the development of numerous enterprise scale solutions and is one of a handful of people to hold the Microsoft Certified Architect accreditation. He was group manager for software and infrastructure development within Microsoft UK's solution development centre and spent a number of years in Redmond as a senior developer and program manager.
He is a member of the British Computer Society where he represented Microsoft on the CITP accreditation process and holds a first class honours degree in computer science from Leeds University.