Consultants

Andy Bolton
Director

Andy has provided his skills to many financial, telecommunications and IT companies such as National Westminster Bank, Barclays de Zoete Wedd, Rank Xerox and Computacenter. He has led process re-design and tools development in several capacity management functions, optimised annual budgets saving over $50m in CAPEX and OPEX and developed a market-leading approach to capacity management as recognised by Gartner. Andy has a broad range of experience covering many aspects of IT Management, including performance analysis and capacity planning, software specification, design and development, financial and budget analysis, defining and validating business cases and service level agreements and other operations support activities. Andy's professional qualifications include the ITIL Foundation Certificate in Service Management (V2 and V3) and the Capacity Management Practitioner's Certificate.

Dr. Manzoor Mohammed
Director

Manzoor has worked on capacity and performance management projects for some of the largest ICT systems in the UK, at companies such as BT, Level 3 Communications and Syntegra. Manzoor's achievements include building capacity models, which helped automate the capacity plan process time for a large ISP reducing cycle-time from several months to several days, and building a predictive performance model for a large system integrator at bid stage, which helped the system integrator re-negotiate the SLA response times. Manzoor's key skill areas are creating volumetric forecast models, building predictive capacity and performance models for ICT systems, and capacity planning and performance analysis of ICT systems. Manzoor's professional qualifications include the ITIL Foundation Certificate in Service Management (V2 and V3) and the Capacity Management Practitioner's Certificate.

Danny Quilton
Director

Danny Quilton is a capacity planning and performance specialist with 18 years experience across a broad range of industries including airline, media, banking, retail and telecommunications. His experience of planning large scale environments is extensive; he has delivered a performance model and associated capacity plan of an e-commerce system that earns revenue in excess of £1bn per year and has implemented decision-support tools to plan network capacity for a pan-European telecommunications provider, enabling a reduction in the planning cycle from several months to several days. Other achievements include operational research (OR) of non-ICT capacity problems, the design of performance monitoring systems to manage thousands of nodes and defining the volume and performance test approaches for a number of major transformation projects, helping to ensure business service level requirements and deployment targets were met. His professional qualifications include the ITIL Foundation Certificate in Service Management (V2 and V3) and the Capacity Management Practitioner's Certificate. Furthermore, as a co-founder of Capacitas he has advised a number of clients including easyJet, BSkyB, BT Radianz and Scottish Water.

Neil McMenemy
Principal Consultant

Neil has 21 years experience in Capacity Management, much of it in the financial sector having worked for Clydesdale Bank, NAB Group, Royal Bank of Scotland, National Westminster Bank, Citibank, FBS, Fidelity, Intelligent Finance and Halifax Bank of Scotland; additionally he has also worked in government and the telecommunications industry. Neil was among the first to develop multi-platform Capacity Planning and has had further success in developing cost-based charging systems, reducing batch schedules, achieving audit compliance, creating capacity models from existing toolsets and eliminating delays to projects by introducing process efficiencies. Neil is a past chairman of UKCMG, having been on its board for five years, and he has presented in France, Spain, Australia and the U.S.A., winning the Best in Stream award at CMG's 25th anniversary conference. Neil's professional qualifications include the ITIL Foundation Certificate in Service Management (V2 and V3) and the Capacity Management Practitioner's Certificate.

Frank Warren
Principal Consultant

Frank is a highly experienced Capacity Management and Performance Assurance practitioner who has delivered services to companies across many sectors, including Royal Bank of Scotland, National Westminster Bank, J Sainsburys PLC, London Electricity PLC, and Data Networks PLC. A strong advocate of best practice, he has successfully implemented Performance Assurance processes at RBS, and established new practice and capability including the integral adoption of specialist application performance management tools. He built an enterprise capacity plan at National Westminster Bank for a £300M programme of work, and more recently developed infrastructure consolidation plans at RBS. Frank’s key strengths include his knowledge of core infrastructure technologies and architectures, the ability to analyse existing IT infrastructure and drive through cost effective change. His professional qualifications include the ITIL Foundation Certificate in Service Management (V3).

Damien Couvet
Principal Consultant

Damien has provided his network modelling and forecasting skills in capacity management and network performance for 10 years, with his main experience within telecommunications companies and Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Damien’s responsibilities at Orange, Wanadoo and Freeserve were to manage OPEX network costs on fixed Broadband and his main achievements include managing network services to profitable status under Wanadoo, introducing innovative product evolutions to lower costs and ensure that key quality targets were achieved, introducing Deep Packet Inspection on broadband and delivering the Migration to BT’s 21CN for some of the Orange services. Damien’s educational qualifications include MSc in Digital Electronics and French Institut Supérieur d’Electronique du Nord (I.S.E.N) degree. His professional qualifications include the ITIL Foundation Certificate in Service Management (V3).

Sameena Hassam
Senior Consultant

Sameena graduated from City University, London with a first class BSc degree in Computer Science. As part of her course, she undertook a 9 month internship with Capacitas in 2005, where she acquired the fundamental skills in Capacity Planning. She also attended many of Capacitas’s training courses and seminars including Capacity Planning: Tools and Methods, Capacity and Performance Management of Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Capacity Planning Microsoft Windows Server. Sameena joined Capacitas as a Junior Consultant in 2007 as part of Capacitas’s graduate intake scheme. She has undertaken tasks to build capacity models that forecast disk, CPU and network resources for medium to large scale systems. She has also gained experience in all areas of performance testing, from scripting to analysis, and has managed performance testing projects. Her professional qualifications include the ITIL Foundation Certificate in Service Management (V3).

Thomas Barns
Consultant

Thomas graduated with a first class BSc degree in Computer Science from City University, London, which included a 15 month industry placement with Capacitas. He joined Capacitas full time in 2008. Since rejoining Capacitas he has been involved with both the technical aspects and management of performance testing projects, including leading and expanding agile performance testing processes for a major client. He has also worked on developing structured capacity and performance models of diverse IT systems and built operational capacity management tools for multiple clients. These included a tool to enable capacity management of over 1000 network links for a major ISP and another to manage the complete infrastructure and data centre space of an insurer. Thomas has presented on several of these areas at UKCMG (www.ukcmg.org.uk) conferences and forums. His professional qualifications include the ITIL Foundation Certificate in Service Management (V3).

Pieris Christou
Junior Consultant

Pieris graduated with a first class BSc degree in Business Computing Systems from City University, London. His course included a 15 month industry placement with Capacitas during which he acquired the core skills of capacity planning and performance management. He has also attended many of the Capacitas public training courses, workshops and seminars. During his final year at university he undertook a project to build an expenses management system allowing for the effective management of consultant expenses. Pieris rejoined Capacitas full time in 2010 as a Junior Consultant, as part of Capacitas’ graduate intake scheme. Since rejoining Capacitas he has been involved with all aspects of performance testing including scripting and analysis, software development and implementing an automated reporting solution for a major client. He also has extensive experience with business intelligence tools, specifically MicroStrategy. His professional qualifications include the ITIL Foundation Certificate in Service Management (V3) and MicroStrategy Certified Report Developer.

Trilesh Bhurtun
Junior Consultant

Trilesh holds a first class Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) degree in Computer Systems Engineering, from City University, London. Prior to joining Capacitas, he completed a one-year industrial placement at the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA), where he was extensively involved in the development of biometric technologies. Trilesh further broadened his skill set while working as a Graduate Software Developer for Telereal Trillium’s Information Systems department. He is currently involved with performance testing projects including scripting and analysis for Capacitas’ high-profile clients. His professional qualifications include the ITIL Foundation Certificate in Service Management (V3).

Amar Makwana
Junior Consultant

Amar graduated with a first class degree in BSc (Hons) Computer Science form City University, London. Prior to joining Capacitas Amar was engaged with another organisation to which he had lead a team that he had personally trained, focusing on maintaining strict company standards. Amar joined Capacitas part time as a Junior Analyst, quickly evolving to a Junior Consultant in July 2011. Amar has been involved in all aspects of performance testing, capacity planning and software development with Capacitas and some of our major clients.

John Arnott
Associate Consultant

John has significant experience in the performance and capacity arena gathered over 30 years in the IT industry working for various clients including BT Exact, Royal Bank of Scotland, National Westminster Bank, NPI, Barclaycard, Grand Metropolitan and BOC. He has provided performance and capacity consultancy skills to large technical infrastructure projects throughout their lifecycle, focussed on the business aspects such as Service Level Agreements, business continuity planning and CAPEX and OPEX costs. John has experience on many platforms, with a significant time spent on large IBM mainframe installations, but including AS/400, Microsoft and various Unix platforms.

Ian Brunt
Associate Consultant

Ian is an ITIL and PRINCE2 qualified business focussed consultant with twenty years experience in the design, development, delivery and management of complex, multi-platform IT Infrastructure projects and services. Ian has extensive experience of sizing IT infrastructures and systems and the development and maintenance of associated capacity models and investment profiles, undertaking the assurance and acceptance of the capacity and performance of complex large-scale n-tier systems and developing and executing system and services acceptance testing. Ian has worked for a wide range of clients including the DWP, NHS, British Aerospace, CWS, the Bank of England, the Meteorological Office and several City-based financial institutions.

Andy Byerley
Associate Consultant

Andy is a midrange capacity and performance management specialist with 8 years experience who has worked with blue chip companies in the IT consultancy, retail, media, and travel industries. He has recently produced a capacity plan to secure a million pound budget for the IT infrastructure investment needed to sustain the rate of his clients business growth, sized a replacement platform to support a cargo haulage operation and made improvements through cost effective technology refresh and upgrades to a large performance constrained customer data warehouse. Andy has expertise in capacity management processes, performance analysis, sizing new systems, building load and performance test plans, developing business wide capacity plans, defining service level agreements, sound financial awareness and management of replatforming and server replacement programmes.

Leon Levy
Associate Consultant

Leon is an experienced IT consultant who has specialised in the Performance and Capacity Management field for over 20 years. During this time he has performed both technical and managerial roles for end-user and consulting organisations including BT, Woolwich, Bank of America, M&G and IBM. Leon can address all aspects of performance and capacity management and often uses this experience to assist clients, such as Friends Provident, to enhance and improve their Capacity Management processes. Leon is also an Executive Committee member of UKCMG.

Michael Moroz
Associate Consultant

Michael has spent the last 26 years working in capacity and performance and has provided his expertise in many companies such as Citibank, Yell Group, Fidelity Investments, Halifax Bank of Scotland and BT Syntegra. He has assisted a major outsourcing company achieve BS15000, provided capacity and performance services to a Basel II project, consolidated a UNIX and iSeries estate while the client was expanding their customer base and has designed and built several internal intranet capacity reporting systems. He has many years experience with a variety of software monitoring and measurement packages including SAS, BMC Patrol and Candle's ETE Watch.

Tom Palenicek
Associate Consultant

Tom's wide range of capacity and performance management (C&PM) experience has been built up over 30 years in IT during which time he has worked for both suppliers (ICL, IBM, software houses) and clients (travel, telecommunications, retail, building societies, UK government) in a variety of roles from C&PM consultant, project manager, architect, operations manager to team leader. In the capacity management role Tom has set up C&PM processes along the lines of ITIL recommendations for Service Delivery and delivered a number of high profile multi-tier, multi-vendor total system sizing projects, including an upgrade to a major airlines SAP system, end-to-end performance analysis of mission critical systems (CRM, billing, logistics, operations), system/application sizing for company de-merger and automatic web based reporting using BMC Patrol. His C&PM work was based around high-end UNIX servers (AIX, Solaris and LINUX) and SAN but did also contain a significant element of MS Windows systems and network analysis running a host of software technologies like Oracle, DB2, Work Load Management, Web servers (Weblogic, Apache), middleware (J2EE) and tools such as Patrol, Tivoli, Toad (Quest) and RRDtool.

Phil Riley
Associate Consultant

Originally from New Zealand, Phil has spent the past 9 years in the UK working on some of Europe's biggest IT transformation programmes. He has worked for M&G, Cable & Wireless, Sainsbury's and most recently Accenture and has extensive experience in client-server and mainframe capacity and performance management. Recent achievements at Accenture include the development of methodologies for volume and performance testing large-scale client-server applications. These methodologies have been applied to great effect, with the successful implementation of critical supply chain systems for their client Sainsbury's. Whilst in the UK Phil has worked predominantly on large scale HP/UX and Sun/Solaris environments, but has also maintained solid IBM/MVS Mainframe and MS/Windows experience. Consequently he is able to take an enterprise-wide approach to capacity and performance management, a necessity in today's complex multi-tiered corporate environments.

Grant Shaw
Associate Consultant

Grant has over 15 years of IT management experience, including over 10 years focussed on operational performance reporting, and has worked for major Financial, IT and Telecommunication companies. He has refined a cross-charging process identifying and tracking missing inventory of over £1M per month, designed performance measurement systems for tracking customer service and defined a dashboard-style performance measurement system for a global telecommunications company enabling a pan-European network rollout. His skills include statistical analysis, defining effective reporting standards, metrics and practices and delivering pertinent information required for planning purposes.

Stephen Wainwright
Associate Consultant

Stephen has for several years provided performance testing expertise for a number of clients, including Cellnet (now O2), Halifax Bank of Scotland, the Post Office and National Westminster Bank. Stephen has created and executed large-scale performance tests, identifying performance bottlenecks and collecting performance data to ensure accurate modelling of infrastructures. He has extensive experience of several testing tools and most common IT platforms including Java, Oracle, Tuxedo, SQL Server, CICS, DB2, Windows 2000, Solaris, HP-UX, Apache and Site Server.

Ian Wilson
Associate Consultant

Ian has 10 years performance testing experience with several major UK companies, including BT, Halifax Bank of Scotland and National Westminster Bank. He has led performance testing teams, developed simulation performance models for large-scale and real-time applications, defined performance tests based on various business scenarios and defined test strategies. Ian has experience with many testing technologies across many application and system platforms, including Web servers, Microsoft Windows, Unix and IBM mainframe.