Chris Gilmour

As CTO at Axians UK, I shape and lead the technology strategy that empowers organisations across the UK to thrive in a digital-first world. My focus is on delivering innovative, human centred solutions that support our customers’ business outcomes, while strengthening Axians’ position as a trusted technology partner. I develop and enable high performing teams, fostering a culture built on autonomy, collaboration, and continuous improvement. By championing our people and supporting capability growth, I ensure we bring exceptional expertise and value to every customer engagement. I have a strong track record of building and executing commercially successful business plans, driving measurable revenue and profit growth, and creating sustainable long term value. Through close collaboration with sales and commercial leadership, I help shape propositions that reflect Axians’ customer centric approach and strengthen our brand in the market. I lead technology driven change initiatives aligned with our strategic goals, partnering with senior leaders and C suite stakeholders to drive transformation across Axians and our customer ecosystem. My communication style ensures clarity and alignment across technical, non technical, and cross functional audiences. With deep experience across the full sales and procurement lifecycle—including tender response, bid presentations, contracting, and third party management—I help ensure we deliver trusted, transparent, and high quality outcomes. I also champion the internal visibility and credibility of the CTO function, ensuring it is seen as a strategic enabler of growth, innovation, and operational excellence.

As Technical Practice Lead my focus is on defining and delivering the Axians Technical Strategy to achieve the company objectives and support our customers in delivering technical excellence. As part of the extended leadership team I coordinate and manage a set of virtual teams that sit across all three of the technical groups (Professional Services, Pre-Sales and Advanced Technical Support) within Axians, allowing us to have access to a set of specialists to provide thought leadership both internally and to our customers. The virtual teams have been directed into four primary areas of specialisation, to allow us to drive innovation and value into our customers: - Cyber Security - Next Generation Networking - Visibility, automation and monitoring - Core infrastructure Critical to the role is identifying, tracking and investigating industry trends, new and emerging solution sets and then assessing their suitability for the business and our customers. This allows Axians to stay abreast of developments in terms of new emerging vendors, solutions, services or architectural approaches, and then bring these to our customers when they have reached a level of maturity that enables their deployment in a stable manner. Recent achievements includes the successful onboarding of SD-WAN as a solution area into Axians and the adoption of this within our customer base.

Leading a team of highly skilled, motivated and experienced Pre-Sales / Solutions Architects we help our customers to achieve their business goals, whether this be monetising their network, the retention of end clients, or an improvement in the quality of experience. Our consultative approach and technical expertise across established, new and emerging technologies is what makes Axians the Systems Integrator for critical networks. Axians works with customers for whom the network is key to their business, and we design, build and deploy innovative solutions that help clients across the Service Provider, Research & Education, and Enterprise markets to address the specific challenges that they are experiencing in their business.

Provide technical Pre-Sales support for Axians account managers and customers focusing mainly on developing services and solutions for Service Providers and their customers. Axians is a Systems Integrator specialising in designing, installing and supporting complex IP network and Datacentre solutions. We work closely with our vendor partners to build our customer solutions and have been an Elite Portfolio partner for Juniper for over 12 years.

Technical Support Engineer for a Systems Integrator with a variety of Strategic vendors including Juniper, Allot and Ciena. The majority of my work is Juniper based as we are a Juniper Elite Partner and my specialisations within Juniper are M/T, MX & E series routers and Juniper Netscreen and SSG security products.

Pro-actively manage the core Data and IP networks to strict SLA deadlines using Netcool Omnibus and HP Openview toolsets. Management of a variety of IP devices including Juniper Routers, Cisco WAN, LAN and IP technologies, Cable Access, and Network Management. Troubleshooting Metro Ethernet services using Alcatel ESS 7450 Ethernet switches.

Project engineer working on the migration of C&W circuits from existing United States network to a new purpose built network

Pro-active management of provisioning issues on all data provide products prior to commissioning and hand over to the on-going support team. First line fault diagnosis during testing and circuit commissioning. Create 'as built' documentation related to the implementation of a customer’s service, reflecting changes to the original design that may have arisen during planning and implementation.