KEITH OBORN NON-EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

CONTACT

Tel: +44 (0) 1256 883876 / +44 (0) 7836 654024 Email: [email protected] LinkedIn: CLICK HERE Non-Exec: CLICK HERE

PROFILE

Non-Exec Director and Solution Architect

Principal Experience in Internet Service Providers / Telecoms

Assisting organisations of all sizes to define their needs, and develop rationale and strategy, translating it into designs optimised to meet customer requirements.

Experienced in all aspects of system and business architecture and design for telecoms companies and other major IT users, delivering solutions that maximise business benefit in realistic timescales.

With a degree from Oxford, and over 40 years of experience, is still developing skills and knowledge, keeping abreast of new and emerging technologies and thinking; able to advise senior executives of the range of options available, articulating pros and cons of each, enabling informed decision making which impacts the bottom line.

Strong commercial acumen, with gravitas; thrives in new product / solution design, understanding competitive positioning, client value propositions, and the commercial drivers which are behind architecture design and investment decision making. Adept at problem solving, troubleshooting and performance improvement, a completer with good attention to detail; able to deal with complexity, navigating the best courses through conflicting priorities in pressured environments.

EDUCATION, PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND MEMBERSHIPS

1974 Keble College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK MA, Natural Philosophy (Physics)

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

• ISEB Certificate in IT Architecture

MEMBERSHIPS

• Member of British Computing Society, Federation of Small Business

OTHER

• I am involved in a 1:1 mentoring programme assisting gifted students from underachieving backgrounds towards Oxbridge applications. I remain in close contact with my former College, and am very interested in helping less privileged students attain their full potential. I was such a student when I became the first member of my family to attend University. CAREER HISTORY

Dates Position Jan 2018 - Present Non-Exec and Independent Consultant

I am now retired from full-time employment, but open to interesting part time opportunities, either commercial or voluntary.

I am serving as Non-Executive Director for a travel startup concept, handling funding, corporate governance, taxation and regulatory issues. I also chair the Patient Participation Group for our local GP Surgery, and serve on the local Parish Council.

I have been privileged to work with a number of exceptional people on projects and systems that have advanced the performance, security and social acceptability of Internet services.

I have worked with a wide range of businesses of all sizes, in all geographies, and at all levels from operations to C-suite, across all areas from first line customer support and operations via business and systems architecture to product management and marketing.

During this time I have acted as liaison between my employers and Ofcom (from Sony UK) and the Home Office (from Nominum).

I retain a keen interest in the future development of the Internet, and in particular the intersection of technological development, social impact and political frameworks. The Internet has become central to most people's daily lives, both in the "developed" world, and increasingly globally. It is essential that players in the Internet industry form working partnerships with social and political structures at all levels of society.

I am also keenly interested in the technical and socio-economic aspects of renewable energy and electric/autonomous vehicle systems. As a household we operate a ground source heat pump and electric vehicles, powered by guaranteed renewable generation providers. I am also an investor in the Sharenergy Reading Hydro project.

I have huge experience of customer-facing (support and consultancy) roles and systems/network development and architecture roles in a wide range of IT and networking environments, notably large Internet Service Providers, Online Service Providers, Daily Newspapers, and academic institutions.

Dates Employer Position Jul 2010 – Nov 2017 Nominum Inc, Redwood City, Senior Solutions Architect CA, USA

Nominum is the leading provider of carrier-class DNS and network security software, with a carrier customer base that provides over 50% of worldwide broadband internet connections. The company also serves a wide range of large corporate customers. FY 2017 turnover approx. $50m

The Nominum “N2” system provides in-network DNS-based services to network operators and end-users in the following areas, with no end-user client software: • Network Threat Detection and Mitigation: automatic detection of, and prevention of, malware-driven activity that threatens operational stability and performance of the operator’s network. • End user malware detection and prevention: detects and reports on infected end-user devices. Provides content blocking and filtering services to prevent end users from deliberately or accidentally connecting to sources of malware infections • End user anti-phishing detection and prevention: Provide content blocking and filtering services to prevent end users from deliberately or accidentally connecting to phishing sites • Regulatory content filtering: network based filtering to prevent end user access to sites and resources deemed illegal under national regulations. • Parental controls content filtering: network based filtering to allow end user “responsible individuals” (retail customer account holder or business customer administrator) to select from a wide set of content categories to which access is to be denied. • In-browser messaging and notification: non-popup injection of alerts and messages to selected end users in browser sessions, with fine control over repetition, message appearance, and end user action controls.

I was recruited as the core of a small team of experienced internet systems architects to deliver the new N2 system on a very aggressive timescale. I have been centrally involved in the conception, initial development, trial customer deployments, first commercial deployments and subsequent global adoption of the system.

I am co-author of several US patents relating to the development of this system. I was responsible for the following areas, delivering multi-year complex projects to clients of the calibre of British Telecom:

• Product definition: feeding customer requirements into Product Management and Engineering to fine-tune the product to customer needs • Highly complex RFx responses • Assisting customers in developing detailed, actionable Business Requirements documentation • Supporting financial benefit analysis (Capex/ROI/NPV calculations) • Matching Business Requirements to product capabilities, generating detailed Solution Definition documents, and thus identifying and scoping custom development requirements • Developing material for and running workshops, presentations and training courses tailored to all relevant areas of the customer’s business from C-suite downwards • Working with customer Project Management to maintain project momentum and ensure the match between requirements and actual delivered capabilities • Supporting operational teams to assist in handover of systems and processes into production • Generating, and ensuring accuracy and timely delivery of all project documentation and other deliverables

Nominum Inc. was sold to Akamai in November 2017, and I have now left the company.

As of late 2017, N2 systems provide services to ~90% of broadband accounts in the UK, and to a large percentage of internet provider customers globally. Dates Employer Position Jan 2003 – Jul 2010 Virgin Media, Hook, Hants, UK Head of Network Systems Architecture

Virgin Media Inc. is an American-domiciled British provider of television, telephone and broadband internet services to domestic and business customers in the UK, delivered primarily through its fibre-optic cable network, headquartered on paper in New York City[1] with operations based in Hook, North Hampshire, UK. The company was formerly known as NTL:Telewest following the merger of NTL Incorporated with Telewest Global, Inc. VMED has 12500 employees and annual turnover of ≈£5b.

I managed and analysed the technical architecture of ISP platforms (access control, traffic management, advanced online services). I delivered high level solution designs for cross- architecture systems. I created and implemented the technical strategy research, product management and regulatory liaison.

I was technical lead on a wide range of projects with capex up to ~£30m, and was required to ensure both technical, financial and market acceptability working closely with Finance and Marketing teams.

• Spearheaded and led the design and delivery of UK’s first “flexible broadband” platform which provided bandwidth on demand and data-volume based billing; improved core network economics by ≈30% by selectively controlling traffic. • Designed VM’s industry-leading DNS platform that offered a 3x improvement in performance over the second-best ISP DNS in the UK. • Initiated and led the design, business case and delivery of a DNS Error Page Redirection advertising system. This system delivers a >£1m net profit from advertising with <1% customer optout and <.01% customer complaint rate; negotiated a revenue sharing deal with the DNS Vendor with no attributed software costs, and near zero hardware costs. • Developed the strategy and architecture for an innovative ‘Legal Peer to Peer’ music distribution and social networking service using a range of cutting edge technologies. • Developed the architecture and solutions for customer equipment provisioning and configuration software; the net savings from these projects exceeded £1m per month capex and improved customer NPS due to lower fault rates.

Dates Employer Position Jan 2000 – Dec 2002 Inktomi Limited Senior Consultant, European Professional Services

Inktomi Corporation was a Californian company that provided software for Internet service providers. I managed the implementation and architectural design of customer projects using Inktomi’s Content Networking product suite.

• Supplied customer support and training for the EMEA region. • Provided NTL “Core IP” design/rollout/support of Web and Media caching for NTL and NTL-VISP consumer ISP services. • Directed the architecture, piloting, implementation, rollout and deputy project management for a global Content and Media Distribution network for Madge Web. • Implemented the Nokia Salo Broadcast System using a CNP platform as a trial for a global corporate streaming media broadcast system. • Designed and delivered customer training courses.

Dates Employer Position Apr 1997 – Dec 1999 Sony Communication Network, Unix Engineering Analyst UK

Sony Communication Network was established in 1995 to provide dialup Internet service, and value added services (chargeable page content, applications, and e-commerce), to the private and SME market in Japan, with initial investment from several divisions of Sony Japan.

Monitoring telecom products, standards, and regulatory environment for SCN and Sony Cellular.

• Provided engineering consultancy for UK-based Japanese Language ISP. • Created the architecture of the proposed mass-market ISP to be launched by Sony UK. • Telecom regulatory liaison for SCN and Sony Cellular, with particular reference to xDSL and un-metered PSTN services. • Member of SPIG and Oftel Internet Forum.

Dates Employer Position Oct 1996 - Mar 1997 Aspen Internet Unix Team Leader

Managed the conversion from Windows NT to Linux server systems.

Dates Employer Position Jul 1991 - Sept 1997 Specialix International Internal Systems Manager

PC connectivity solutions manufacturer

• Directed all aspects of IT, Communications, Services and Office Space utilisation.

Dates Employer Position Jun 1990 - Jun 1991 Information International Customer Support Representative

Pre-press systems manufacturer

• Provided second-line support of III’s Sun-based pre-press systems for Newspaper Publishing PLC (The Independent).

EARLIER CAREER

Dates Employer Position 1984 – 1990 High Level Hardware Ltd (Unix minicomputer manufacturer)

Dates Employer Position 1978 – 1984 Linotype Paul Ltd (Pre-press systems manufacturer)

Dates Employer Position 1975 – 1978 Oxfordshire Area Health (medical electronics and Authority patient safety)

After graduation I took short term positions at ICL and Marconi

TECHNOLOGY SKILLS

• Operating Systems: Linux (Red Hat, SuSe, Mandrake) Solaris, Windows, SCO, BSD, HPUX, IRIX, AIX • Applications: DNS (BIND and Nominum), DHCP (Cisco CNR, dhcpd, Bridgewater), Radius (Funk), Content Caching (Cachelogic, NetApp, Inktomi and others) Content Networking (Inktomi and Cachelogic/Velocix), Subscriber Profile Management (Bridgewater and others), Apache. Sendmail and other mail systems, ntp, nfs, smb, nntp/INN/Cnews/Dnews, UUCP, etc. • Exposure to: Nominum Vantio and N2 system, Inktomi Enterprise Search, Inktomi Media Publisher, Microsoft Windows Media Server • Networking: Ethernet, TCP/IP, routing and application protocols, Cisco IOS and other router/switch vendor systems. Analogue dialup and PPP, theoretical knowledge of ATM • Deep Packet Inspection devices (Allot, P-Cube. Ellacoya, Sandvine) • Programming Languages Perl, cgi, shell scripting, etc. A little XML, Rusty C • Hardware: Wide knowledge of many types and architectures.

LANGUAGE SKILLS

Modest French, Very rusty Arabic and Japanese