STEVE ADAMS

Steve's IT career began in the mid 80's at British Petroleum, working in the operations group on a large DEC VAX Cluster environment. From this foundation, Steve migrated to a Unix system Administration sole, supporting a large network of Sun, HP, Apple and PC workstations and servers for BP's IT Research Unit. This move into the world of Unix and open standards based computing formed the basis of a subsequent career at Oracle UK.

Joining Oracle in 1990 to work within the internal IT Division, Steve gained experience on all the major Unix platforms and technologies. Specialising in large servers (clusters, SMP) and the more exotic technologies (massively parallel computing), Steve was drawn to early implementations of Oracle's Parallel Sever database technologies - now a mainstay of large corporate computing, and evolving into the latest Grid technology. In the mid 90's Steve's experience on the nCUBE platform led to him being drafted into a specialist consulting team to work on what became the worlds first deployment of digital Video-on-Demand (VOD) for British Telecom. Oracle's expansion into the new Internet and multi-media technologies allowed the formation of a specialist "Emerging Technologies" group, charged with accelerating the adoption of new technologies in Oracle's EMEA territories. Steve moved through a number of roles, including customer support, technical pre-sales and consulting roles during the late 90's, a period of explosive growth in the IT sector.

On leaving Oracle in 2000, Steve joined a startup venture with Grammy winning classical music producer Michael Haas. The new company foresaw the coming revolution in digital music distribution and sales, although venture funding was not forthcoming due to the Internet bubble bursting and subsequent lack of investment.

Steve's next role was at Internet hosting and Application Service Provider Interliant (now Navisite). Interliant's small UK operation was part of a much larger global presence based in the USA. Steve's role at Interliant was to help grow a new practice based on a Unix/Oracle platform, to complement the existing Microsoft and Lotus notes practices. This hybrid role saw Steve responsible for hands-on technical work (server deployment and support), aspects of business development (service and proposition definitions, partner recruitment), sales support (technical pre-sales and customer meetings), as well as helping the operations director recruit new staff to grow the new group.

Following a family decision to relocate from the South East to the North East (North Yorkshire) in 2002, Steve was recruited by London based Content Management specialist service supplier Object 1 Ltd (now merged to form LB Icon UK) to perform a UK wide technical pre-sales role within the small New Business team. The intention was for Object 1 to expand it's presence and activity in the north of the UK, and that Steve's location would allow greater levels of activity in the north. Working for Object 1 gave Steve great experience of the niche Content Management market place, and exposure to customers in both Public (Central and Local Government) and Private Sectors, and across industries.

Steve left Object 1 in the Summer of 2004 in order to pursue the founding of NorthStar.