fred thornborrow

Build, manage and mentor a global team of incident and escalation managers to resolve vmware's most complex product/services and customer satisfaction issues 24x7. Provide leadership during crisis events, cross product, services and engineering teams world-wide. Drive Post Mortem's and RCA outcomes to improve products/services/processes/people.

* Volunteer at ProNet - Fremont Chapter * Training and Development Team Leader and Steering Committee member. * Currently delivering Job Preparation, Job Search and LinkedIn training classes for new members. * Assist members with resumes, LinkedIn profiles, job applications and interview reviews. * Review and update training materials.

* Management of Senior Software Development Engineers and global teams. * Collect Customer open source requirements through various marketing efforts and input from Customer account teams to drive the delivery of open source software integrations through SDLC processes. * This engagement resulted in the increased availability of open source packages in Solaris from 50 to over 270 packages. * Sole responsibility for ensuring Legal, Security, Export and Accessibility requirements are achieved before any piece of open source software is integrated into the Solaris Operating System. * Provided leadership and mentoring across other engineering teams wishing to use open source as part of a product introduction.

Management of 3 Development teams covering both software and hardware features supporting enterprise high-end platforms and operating systems software. (Open Source Freeware, X Server Software, SPARC graphics engineering) Drive the awareness and need for more open source availability within Solaris to meet Customer expectations and drive product competitiveness and adoption through marketing engagements and customer success programs. Provided leadership across two major consolidations within the Solaris operating system delivering bi-weekly builds on schedule, chaired weekly team meetings driving feature integrations and bug reduction targets on-time. Program managed the re-synchronization of the X server code with the latest open source version available avoiding the maintenance of over 200 patches. This improved the ability to update the X server code versions in sync with community versions. Program managed the delivery of two open source Developer Releases of the Solaris Operating System.

Provide Chief of Staff duties to Director for three Software Development Teams delivering multiple software products such as Sun Management Center, Service Provisioning System, Sun Grid Engine and N1 Systems Manager. Duties include negotiating resources across teams to meet deadlines, road-map coordination, agreeing contractor and sustaining team resources, also track and drive product features and business unit dependencies and alignment.

Managed a global team responsible for Sustaining Engineering of Middleware software products including Directory Server, Messaging Server, Portal Server and Calendar Server. Implemented 24x7 support coverage for Customers. Also responsible for Release Engineering, product builds, development testing, patching and bug trending/operational data gathering to drive product quality.

Managed a team of 12 Senior Serviceability Architects responsible for driving serviceability features such as fault management, FRU replacement procedures, remote services and diagnosis capabilities. Also introduced product scorecards to demonstrate ROI benefits of serviceability features to product development teams.

Second in command to Senior Director with responsibility for a global team of approx 150 staff. Delivering Sustaining Engineering responsibilities for all major releases of the Solaris Operating System Software. Managed a budget of approx $15M through head count controls, capitol budgets and travel and training. Defined metric reports to drive customer quality requirements. Implemented first global 24x7 coverage model to ensure customer problems were continually worked until resolved. Used Sigma methodologies to improve product release quality, reduce bad patches and increase time to resolve and fix.

Managed a team of Software Engineers responsible for the Networking TCP/IP technologies within the Solaris Operating System. Reviewed the field product quality data and provided product development teams with features and enhancements to improve product compatibility with other major OS's and customer satisfaction. Took ownership for delivering worldwide technology training for Networking Technologies throughout the Companies Service Organization.

Pioneered the first Solaris Sustaining Team outside the US to provide quick response to Customer escalations that were found to be product defects requiring Software patches. Implemented patch improvements through engineer code reviews and regression testing. Negotiated at VP and Senior Director levels throughout Europe to resolve critical Customer situations.

Responsible for all Critical Customer Situations across Northern Europe requiring Executive Management involvement. Managed a small highly specialized team of Engineers who would fly and investigate situations and co-ordinate across internal resources to drive Customer resolution. Introduced and managed hot-spare systems ready to ship across Europe to ensure Customers could continue business operations. Implemented processes and procedures to meet ISO 9000 standards for Field Service Operations.

Managed the Call Center Operations Team responsible for taking initial Customer requests for both Hardware and Software service calls across the UK. Implemented Hardware call screening to ensure the right parts and skilled engineering resources were dispatched to customers sites to meet service level agreements - often to meet 2 hour response times across the UK. Implemented Software Call management processes to ensure Customers were passed through Call receipt and contract verification directly to Software Engineers to avoid delays in response.