Jean-Paul van Ryswyck

My primary role as Head of IT is to develop and deliver on all key business strategies, that require either an IT focus or a degree of IT assistance, for the TFG London owned brands of Hobbs, Phase Eight and Whistles. I am responsible for maintaining the entire IT infrastructure (hardware, software, networks, personnel) which in turn supports the stores, concessions and the staff working both at Head Office and remotely across the UK. I am the senior relationship and contracts owner for many service providers, working to ensure a successful strategic partnering whilst managing an extremely tight IT budget. I lead a small team of 19, driven by both a culture of collaboration and a hands-on approach, to keep the department agile within the ever-changing retail sector. The major highlights of the role to date have namely been… o Restructuring 3 separate I.T. departments into 1. o Introducing Hobbs and Whistles businesses to a new POS system. o Working on relocating Phase Eight, Studio Eight and Damsel in a Dress warehouses to a new location. o Introducing multi-channel gift cards as well as introducing a gift receipt offering on the brand’s websites.

During my time as Head of IT at Hobbs, I headed up a small team of 6. We were responsible for the on-premise server environment, the website operations, most head office and store related systems and all IT support. Major project highlights during my time as Head of IT included: o A full VMware infrastructure refresh where we replaced an obsolete HP Proliant/NETAPP infrastructure with a Dell/Cisco-based SAN environment, upgrading to ESXi 6.7 as the platform. o CIMS (Prologic's ERP solution) was migrated from a 7-year-old on-premise HP-based server environment to new Dell-based server environment. o In collaboration with Aptos, the Store6.3 servers were migrated from BT Cloud Compute to AWS with no downtime for the stores' POS. o The Hobbs Head Office was relocated from Welbeck St to Eversholt St with less than 8 hours downtime for the entire company. o The Hobbs website was migrated to SFCC as a platform with my own key focuses in the migration centering on secure and accurate customer data migration, CRM data flows, store tablet sales and warehouse systems integration. The team itself delivered on the critical CIMS data flows to and from the new SFCC platform, as well as the migration of all historical sales data. On the more BAU side of things, I headed the projects to: o Introduce Symantec Endpoint Protection as the TFG ZA preferred Antivirus system. o Refresh the redundant firewall pair within the Timico (now Digital Space) cloud from Cisco ASAs to Fortigate M200s. o Consolidate the following to the TFG Brands (London) chosen vendors and systems: IP Telephony (upgrade from desk-based telephony to Mitel's MiCollab), POS (Aptos Store6.3 to Intraweb Infinity), Finance Systems (Sunsystems on premise to Sunsystems in Sapphire cloud).

I studied first and second year between 1997 and 1999 at which stage I ran out of funding. I proceeded to study a Diploma in Electrical Engineering in Cape Town. In 2003 I returned, having secured the appropriate funding, to complete the final year of my Bachelor of Commerce degree. I was a Student Teacher (2003) at Kingswood College, Grahamstown. As a rugby coach there, I was in charge of the famous 56 club.

Electrical Engineering