Management Team

Mike founded Opsera in 2005 to focus on the next big technology trend - open source software. Mike was responsible for developing the vision and strategy, recruiting the initial team, raising angel funding, and establishing the operations for Opsera. He is now primarily responsible for our strategy, sales and operations, as well as consulting for our high-growth clients.

Mike combines both big-company sales and management experience with start-up and high-growth company leadership. He has over 24 years of technology and consulting experience, having founded and built three services companies in the last decade. He started his career working in sales and sales management at ICL and Oracle, before co-founding Viant - a Silicon Valley Internet and e-commerce services company - in 1996. Viant was backed by Kleiner Perkins, Caulfield & Byers. Mike has worked in many industry sectors, with particular emphasis on the financial services sector during the five years he lived in the US.

On his return to the UK, he founded and was the CEO of Rubus, a venture-backed technology consultancy, and grew the company to over 300 employees in five locations in Europe. Mike's experience in building teams and attracting high-calibre employees earned Rubus a highly respected reputation with clients, together with a dynamic and rewarding company culture. Rubus' quality was recognised by the industry when Mike won the Ernst & Young UK Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year award, and Rubus received a string of awards from the CBI's Most Promising Company award to the winner of the Deloitte Fast 50.

Mike sold Rubus to Detica PLC in 2003. Mike was Business Unit Director for Detica's Commercial business unit for 12 months, before leaving to set up Opsera.

Mike holds a Joint Honours BSc in Physics and Electronics from Brunel University.

Oliver is the Head of Enterprise Solutions and combines his business, functional and technical know-how to lead and motivate our teams to deliver successfully for our enterprise clients. He has thirteen years' experience solving business problems through the innovative application of technology, and has consistently delivered leading-edge projects and large programmes on time and to budget.

He co-founded Opsera with the belief that Open Source software is fundamentally changing the software and services landscape. Prior to Opsera he was a Principal Consultant for Rubus, working with large and high-growth businesses to help them develop their technical capabilities and launch new web based services and products. Prior to Rubus, he worked as a Senior Consultant in the Banking and Securities Consulting team of Cap Gemini, and he started his career at ICL Financial Services. Prior to joining Opsera he was the Product Manager for Inspired Broadcast Networks, where he had P&L responsibility for delivering several new product lines within a large-scale networked entertainment service.

Oliver holds an MBA from INSEAD and a BSc in Philosophy & Economics from the University of Bristol.

Robin is our Technical Manager responsible for oversight of all our technical activities and partnerships. He also acts as the Enterprise Architect on our largest development projects. Robin has over eleven years of technical consulting experience, over thirteen years of Java and has near-shore/offshore development experience spanning seven years.

Robin has very strong technical ability with business insight, leadership, vision and resourcefulness, along with good communication skills. He has a breadth of experience in system integration, bespoke development, enterprise integration and BI/data warehousing tools. Robin is an Open Source and open standards advocate who has contributed knowledge, patches and new functionality to a variety of Open Source projects including Acegi (Spring Security), the Spring Framework, Alfresco and Apache Tomcat.

He is a firm believer in the fact that there is always a better way of doing something - whether that is through mobile data access, applying technology such as RFID, methodologies such as Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) with tools such as EasyB, or working leaner with frameworks such as Grails and Spring so that he can focus on the business objectives.

Robin was the first non-founder to join Opsera, having previously worked with the founders at Rubus. His roles at Rubus encompassed Technical Architecture, Data Architecture and Project Management with a focus on the Financial Services sector.

Robin joined Rubus in August 2000, having previously worked as a Technical Consultant providing MIS solutions and Oracle DBA expertise to UK Police Forces.

Robin holds a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from Nottingham University.

James is the Head of Infrastructure Services and the Product Manager for Opsview. He has over ten years' experience in IT consulting and project management. His specialism is in IT infrastructure management with experience of building data centres and developing automated monitoring and management systems.

In 2003 James founded Altinity, an Open Source software development and consulting company. In 2004 Altinity released Opsview, an Open Source system monitoring tool and quickly gained customers worldwide. In August 2008 Opsview was awarded Product Excellence award for Best System Management Tool at LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco. James merged Altinity with Opsera in 2008.

Prior to Altinity, James was Director of Infrastructure Management for UK Web Works where he delivered successful projects for a range of clients in construction and local government. He also worked at Blue Sky Communications, pioneers in IBM ebusiness and collaboration technologies where he established their managed hosting business.

James has a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from The University of Liverpool.

Martin is our Head of Product Development and has over 20 years of experience in architecting and developing software products. He brings a wealth of international experience, having worked in the USA, UK, Sweden, Germany, Ireland and Switzerland.

Martin has specialist expertise in Enterprise Content Management systems such as Alfresco and dotCMS, object-oriented technologies, and open source tools in distributed web architectures; e.g. Web Services, EJB, and CORBA. He is particularly interested in the mobile arena and its technologies: Martin has lead the development of a J2ME based download system for mobile phones that became such a success that it was sold to Openwave, the leader in the WAP and J2ME area.

His interest in open source technologies led Martin to develop his own open source product Web Fast Forms - the product provides an easy way for Java developers to create a form-based web UI on top of a relational database, and was released on the internet under the GPL licence. So far, it has been downloaded over 1000 times.

At Opsera Martin overseas the product development and is the lead architect for OpsMailmanager, which is an enhancement to the Alfresco CMS so it can manage email information intelligently. The development of OpsMailmanager included integrating the Apache James server with the Alfresco content management system, which led him to do several enhancements and updates to the IMAP implementation in Apache James.

He also has an interest in development methodology and software development lifecycles. His favourite agile development method is Scrum but he also has experience from using Feature Driven Development (FDD).

Martin has a degree in system development and electronics from Borås University College in Sweden.

Lynda is our Financial Controller responsible for all Opsera's financial and operational activities. She has over 22 years' accountancy experience; the last 10 years spent working in high growth technology SME's. She trained with a 12 partner firm of Chartered Accountants qualifying in May 1992 and worked in practice for 10 years, in audit, tax and accounts preparation.

She moved into industry in the role of Financial Controller for a small group of companies, taking responsibility for the finance and administration departments. In 1998 she set up her own practice providing accounting, VAT, payroll and taxation advice services, and for several companies providing a fully outsourced finance department.

She studied Accountancy at Kingston Polytechnic and is an ACA Chartered Accountant.