I Talk With People

I like to be held accountable. You should too. 

That means we’re going to chat. Regularly.

About targets, and how we get there, and what needs to change, and how we get better. And if the day ever comes when everything is in sync, the question becomes "can we duplicate this?" 

I get things done, the important things, and along the way I help make our Team (Caps) inclusive and strong and ready for the next challenge – to meet it and beat it.

If history predicts the future, look at my accomplishments. 

In most cases my numbers are above average. In others, my accomplishments are outstanding and top tier. But what they all have in common is…

I had zero experience when I began each tenure and still produced, sometimes exceptionally well. 

I am able to quickly grasp new concepts and technology, then I transfer that enthusiasm and knowledge to other people in a way that makes them act.

Other words used to describe me include, smart, funny, well rounded, professional, and more.

Once in a while humble and modest, but this isn’t that time; I mean c'mon, it’s LinkedIn.

Most business is about relationships and I attribute all my success, like below, on a simple formula… 

Act in ways that build trust, be genuine and be genuinely interested in people and do good things. If you do that, business will follow.

That's what happens to me, every time.

I wish I had some wild and crazy sales strategy, but I don’t, “be interested instead of interesting” opens a lot of doors.

I have led training seminars and done presentations 1 on 1 and to large groups, connecting the dots on technical and product details in a way that people ‘get it’ and act. 

As a hunter I am relentless; as a farmer I am attentive and thorough.

In summary I find, develop, maintain and grow the business. 

I create enduring revenue streams.

Derrick Swain

GitLab

FinOps Lead

FinOps Foundation

Collaborating and building the FinOps Discipline with the most incredible and fast-growing community of smart people! www.finops.org/join Come and get involved.

Community Contributor

FinOps Education Principal

Senior Instructor facilitating & enhancing multiple certified education programmes for public and private delivery
Public Speaker promoting awareness, providing thought leadership & facilitating debate across Public Cloud Value
Enterprise Advisor building roadmaps to adopt the framework of FinOps principles, domains and capabilities
Executive Mentor supporting and shaping strategic alignment towards Cloud-Native business success

FinOps Engineering Director

Taking the Good Word of FinOps to the people!!! Come and get involved, and learn about how to accelerate cloud efficiencies and drive out waste!

I teach the FinOps Certified Practitioner training course on behalf of the FinOps Foundation, sharing my experience and knowledge to add depth and context to the course materials and enjoying connecting with such a broad spectrum of professionals across the Public Cloud customer landscape.

FinOps Instructor

I lead IBM’s FinOps Strategy Advisory practice for the UK & Ireland market, working with private and public sector clients to holistically address the challenge of Maximising Cloud Value.

My practice will work closely with you to establish tailored policy, governance and compliance to protect and enhance your hyperscaler platform investments, and establish accurate and effective cost forecasting models that help you to grow your cloud capabilities with confidence.

Where necessary, we integrate seamlessly with FinOps Managed Services teams provided by IBM as well as best-in-class analytics tooling from our valued partners to build and strengthen your CCoE, TBM and FinOps practice alignments and adoption.

FinOps Strategy Advisory Lead

• Provided strategic consulting to FinOps and Business Leadership teams, driving accelerated FinOps practice adoption.
• Built programs of education, communication, empowerment, collaboration, and transparency across complex business environments.

Senior FinOps Consultant

Blood Bikes Scotland

I am a Volunteer Rider for Blood Bikes Scotland. We support NHS Scotland by efficiently and effectively transferring urgent medical supplies, equipment and other items between NHS sites, as well as directly serving patients in the community.

Volunteer Rider

Apptio, an IBM Company

I provide experienced strategic consulting to FinOps and Business Leadership teams within our premier customers across EMEA. 

I deliver focused strategies to drive accelerated FinOps practice adoption, supporting the introduction, development and enhancement of the entire FinOps Framework.

I build programs of education, communication, empowerment, collaboration and transparency across complex business environments guided by the primary goal of maximising the value returned against every dollar of Cloud infrastructure spending.

I also teach the FinOps Certified Practitioner class for Apptio customers, on behalf of the FinOps Foundation.

de Mora Ltd

Managing Director

Onica, a Rackspace Technology Company

- Lead Consultant building and delivering FinOps consulting, education and insights for businesses across EMEA
- Cultural Evangelist bringing multidisciplinary teams and groups together, building collaborative context spaces
- Business Value Focus is at the centre of all cloud engineering decisions, empowered by data analytics
People-First solutions to drive continued improvements in cloud efficiency through value ownership

Lead FinOps Consultant

Working across Sky / NBCU Cloud Engineering, supporting numerous Resident SRE teams and driving improved awareness and visibility of Cloud Engineering Optimisation. Proving and Improving the business value gained from the Cloud!

Cloud FinOps Manager

Cloudreach

I own the end-to-end strategy, direction and definition for Cloudreach Managed Services offerings. 

I am responsible for relationship management and development with numerous external partners that bring their unique abilities to elevate and enhance our blended Managed Service offering, and I am always looking for new conversations to further broaden our capabilities for our customers.

I am responsible for the overall customer experience with Cloudreach through their cloud adoption journey, and I align closely with our customers to ensure that we are ready to work together to meet and overcome any challenges we encounter on that shared journey. Helping our customers to evolve a vision of what possible looks like, as we work together to fine-tune and continually improve their technology landscape through Cloud.

I work directly with our many talented delivery engineers, business leaders and sales teams within Cloudreach to make sure that we are consistently offering the very best experience to our customers. I am immensely proud to be able to develop offerings that showcase the incredible skills of my colleagues; working with these awesome people is one of the best privileges of my role.

Senior Product Manager, Managed Services

I am working to define and evolve the way that Cloudreach builds and delivers our Managed Services Portfolio for our customers, shaping it around a unique customer journey through Public Cloud. 
I am creating clear, robust pathways for Cloud Technology adoption and elevation, achieved by best-in-class delivery, drawing together our incredibly gifted and skilled engineering teams, enterprise-grade tooling and lightweight flexible processes. I also engage with a number of industry-defining organisations on behalf of Cloudreach (FinOps Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, etc) to share our insights and continually enhance our products in line with the emerging best practices for Public Cloud.

Senior Product Architect, FinOps / Cost Control

I am leading a global group of highly skilled analysts and engineers, laser-focused on delivering Cost Optimisation service excellence through our collective experience and unique insights into Cloud Economics. Together with our customers, we work to identify and enable ways to maximise value on Cloud spend, through the entire solution stack and across all major CSPs. We are continually refining and streamlining the way that we serve our customers - we work through and across all of Cloudreach, using that tight integration to identify new ways to help our customers gain the maximum value and capability empowerment through innovating in cloud.

FinOps Director

I am responsible for leading an Agile team from environment design through operational delivery and onwards to continual iterative improvement, through technical excellence and DevOps / Agile processes.

Key Responsibilities:
- Understand, communicate and document customer cloud environments
- Build and maintain a strong relationship with customer development and product teams to enable - the highest level of understanding of customer environments and stacks
- Recognise areas for improvement within customer environments around automation, CI/CD, and platform reliability.
- Research, plan and implement relevant solutions in collaboration with customer operations and development teams.
- Execute Agile Scrum Master role as and when required, leading agile ceremonies and supporting the team in maintaining relentless focus on driving value delivery through Agile.
- Use Cloudreach Management platforms to provide the monitoring and management of the customer's estate e.g. Splunk/Chef/Ansible/Puppet
- Lead the creation of custom monitoring components to provide deep monitoring of application estate, and integrate with Cloudreach monitoring platforms or customer platforms

Cloud Improvement Services Manager

My core mission is to drive Agile Improvement Services engagements from a technical perspective, leading by example and playing a key role in the technical decision-making process that will run throughout that engagement. As a DevOps Lead, I exemplify technical expertise and best practice. I am responsible for leading an Agile team from environment design through operational delivery and onwards to continual iterative improvement, both in terms of technical excellence and DevOps / Agile processes.

Key Responsibilities:
- Understand, communicate and document customer cloud environments
- Build and maintain a strong relationship with customer development and product teams to enable - the highest level of understanding of customer environments and stacks
- Recognise areas for improvement within customer environments around automation, CI/CD, and platform reliability.
- Research, plan and implement relevant solutions in collaboration with customer operations and development teams.
- Execute Agile Scrum Master role as and when required, leading agile ceremonies and supporting the team in maintaining relentless focus on driving value delivery through Agile.
- Use Cloudreach Management platforms to provide the monitoring and management of the customer's estate e.g. Splunk/Chef/Ansible/Puppet
- Lead the creation of custom monitoring components to provide deep monitoring of application estate, and integrate with Cloudreach monitoring platforms or customer platforms

DevOps Manager

Oracle

Working within the ScaledAgile SAFe framework, I was a principal engineer working within the Cloud Enablement Agile Release Train. 

During this Program Increment, I was involved in exploring and modernizing software maintenance cycles for instances hosted with Oracle's public "OCI" infrastructure. 

I have also been assisting as a backup Scrum Master, and providing coaching and training of team members throughout the Agile Release Train.

Agile Team Principal Engineer

Proud to say that I have now joined Oracle Global IT's "Cloud Infrastructure Engineering" group. My team and I are leveraging cutting-edge technologies to provide a streamlined enterprise cloud hosting service to key internal customer groups and services. The remit of Oracle Global IT is to be the First Adopter and Biggest Influencer of new solutions within Oracle. Driving this approach through an enhanced DevOps methodology, we work to produce rapid, high quality, robust solutions based around an "Infastructure-as-Code" approach.

Technologies / tools being worked with / investigated currently:
- OCI (Oracle Cloud Infastructure)
- HashiCorp Terraform
- Chef
- Python
- Ansible
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- Puppet
- JIRA
- Jenkins

I am excited to discuss any of these and other SaaS delivery / Infrastructure-as-Code solutions and methodologies, drop me a note!

Cloud Infrastructure Principal Engineer

- DevOps Champion within Oracle, working to deliver next-generation Bare Metal Cloud hosting solutions
- Strong proponent of "Service is Key" paradigm, driving away from single instance criticality designs
- Annual / quarterly budget forecasting based on capacity analysis for data centre
- Principal (Tier 4) Data Centre Engineer for Oracle Global IT's primary EMEA Tier 2 Hosting Environment.
- Technical & Architectural Lead Engineer for High-Density Virtual Hosting in EMEA.
- Oracle Solaris 10 & 11 L4 Escalation point.
- Oracle Linux 5, 6 & 7 L4 Escalation point.
- Oracle Virtual Server 3.x  L4 Escalation point.
- Oracle 7420 / ZFSSA Engineered Storage Appliance Technician.
- Veritas NetBackup / Oracle Secure Backup Infrastructure Engineer.
- Responsible for ensuring strict adherence to Data Centre standards and requirements
- 24x7 On-call onsite support.
- Additional remote support for other remote data centres in UK, Texas, Colorado, Singapore.
- Technical Presenter / Trainer.

Data Centre Principal Engineer

- Annual / quarterly budget forecasting based on capacity analysis for data centre
- Supplier relationship management
- Oracle Solaris 10 & 11 L4 Escalation point.
- Veritas NetBackup / Oracle Secure Backup Infrastructure Engineer.
- Responsible for ensuring strict adherence to Data Centre standards and requirements
- 24x7 On-call onsite support.
- Additional remote support for other remote data centres in UK, Texas, Colorado, Singapore.
- Technical Presenter / Trainer.

Data Centre Senior Engineer

•	Critical role within Oracle Global IT, responsible for owning the design and release of bespoke Solaris 10 & 11 deployment solutions within Oracle Global IT & also to our (mostly internal) customers.
•	Ensure design compliance with various business and legal standards for Solaris within the business. (SOX, ISO9001, ISO27001, internal security review board)
•	Develop and publish Global IT Security Standard for Global IT Solaris 11 production deployment architecture design.
•	Develop new OS tools to provide a high level of automation in systems management and monitoring.
•	Deliver enhanced technical training to other engineers.
•	Maintain a close working relationship between Operations, Service Design & Tools Development teams.
•	Actively investigate and explore emerging technologies within Solaris and complementing areas.

Solaris Technical Product Manager

•	Primary technical POC and test & release engineer for new technology deployments within the Solaris space for Oracle Global IT
•	Assist the Global IT Solaris Technical Product Manager in architecting new enterprise solutions to meet changing business needs and Production Environment requirements.
•	Facilitate and contribute to internal Solaris security standards for Solaris 10 and previous.

Solaris Service Design Senior Engineer

My team's function fits pretty squarely within the "Service Transition" stage of the ITSM framework. I am responsible for working with Solution Designers to evaluate, build, test and approve new Service Design packages, creating approved deployment packages to be installed in Oracle's Production Data Centre.

I am responsible for the quarterly testing and approval of Solaris patches, fulfilling SOX control CFG010.

I also work with a team of people decommissioning legacy Sun Microsystems infrastructure, ensuring that SOX requirements are met concerning data archiving and secure removal & destruction of storage where applicable.

Solaris Test & Release Lead Engineer

Certified FinOps Professional, Senior FinOps Leader, Senior Instructor

I am an experienced technology leader with a wealth of expertise in enterprise-level engineering, infrastructure value management, policy & governance, and strategy. I excel at driving organizational transformation through outcome-focused processes. Furthermore, I focus on fostering collaboration across diverse teams and disciplines, developing robust tailored methodologies leveraging elements of existing frameworks, and implementing automated solutions that maximize cloud efficiency while aligning closely to business goals.
I bring a proven track record of leading and advising on complex technology initiatives that deliver significant measurable results in efficiency, scalability, ROI and operational improvements. My work has consistently emphasized leveraging data-driven insights to empower organizations to adopt a culture of accountability, ownership, and outcome-driven technology solutions.

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The Battle

Derrick Swain

Ben de Mora

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