Live Services Manager
Responsible for the availability, security and performance of key online products and services
In this role, I am responsible for the majority of Sage’s online product portfolio, including high profile applications such as Sage X3 Online (our most complete software solution for Enterprise businesses). My focus has been on migrating all services from traditional data centres to cutting edge cloud platforms. We take advantage of higher level cloud services to maximise the scalability and drastically reduce the management overhead.
I am responsible for the entire Live Services budget for all global services. Working closely with Product teams and Finance, we deliver value to our customers through innovation and efficiency savings. As part of this responsibility, I am heavily involved in the key partner alliances, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. I own the global support contracts, and predominantly involved in negotiations to drive value and improved service. In the last 12 months, I’ve saved more than £600k through data centre migrations and cloud platform cost optimisation exercises.
My key stakeholders are the Technology Executive, Customer Service teams, Product Owners, Product Delivery teams and Finance. Through these teams, we deliver an outstanding and unified customer experience. I champion the Incident Management, Problem Management and Change Control processes to minimise unnecessary disruption for our customers and mitigate any weaknesses. I am an advocate of Continuous Delivery, trending to Continuous Deployment, Containerisation and Infrastructure as a Service.
Achievements include:
- Accountable for four teams of Live Service Specialists and ~20 key online initiatives whilst embedding a DevOps approach and working environment
- Raised availability of domestic services from 92% to 99.93% and continue to run the European services with above 99.99% availability supported by an on-call specialist rota and 24x7 “eyes on glass” monitoring team
- Responsible for a budget of over £10M, covering all global services
- Launched Sage’s first European wide cloud-based ERP platform and associated applications in 2013
- Developed the first 100% cross-charge finance model in Sage which provides product owners with a truly accurate product profitability
- Consolidated 22 incident management processes into a single customisable process that is standardised across the European Live Service Management team. This increased confidence in our ability to run effective incidents without prior knowledge of the services