Nigel Thomas

With more than 20 years experience in the computer industry, Nigel has been involved in all stages of application and product development, from inception, through analysis and design to product launch and post sales support. Currently Nigel is working as a freelance Oracle and EAI consultant. Recent assignments have included: Defining the data model and data migration strategy for a government modernisation project Defining the 30 month year data migration strategy for a regulated telco's wholesale and global services operational systems Defining and implementing an automated test-and-release process for a rather elderly, in-house developed and frequently modified Oracle Forms based application Leading the end to end performance testing and tuning of a J2EE/OC4J/Oracle RAC application to meet contractual acceptance requirements prior to national rollout for a UK government department Design and development of a rule-driven, XML based legal document production subsystem Updating competitive analysis of the ETL/EAI market for Informatica Developing the UK launch PR for Catchfire Systems

Prior to freelancing, Nigel spent two years as Director of Product Management for SpiritSoft, working with the Sales and Marketing departments to develop a market position, evangelise SpiritSoft products, and differentiate them within the Application Integration Market; and with R&D – and customers - in identifying the broad direction and priorities for future product development. Nigel was the main technical and marketing spokesperson for SpiritSoft in US and EMEA with analysts, journalists; writing articles, presentations and webcasts in support of these aims; and was also involved in creating and developing partnership opportunities. Before joining SpiritSoft Nigel spent six years at EAI pioneer Constellar – now a part of DataMirror – in senior development, account management and product marketing roles. During the acquisition period he helped position and differentiate Constellar and DataMirror products in the EAI / eBusiness Integration space, so developing a viable strategy for product integration.

Nigel spent over eight years at Oracle Corporation, architecting and delivering Oracle's Accounting products and then moving on to worldwide performance consulting and CASE development assignments. During the late 1980s and early 1990s Nigel enjoyed nearly nine years learning his trade in a variety of positions at Oracle UK Ltd. Initially leading the analysis, design and build of the Oracle Accounting v3 product, Nigel took on the entire support and onward development of the applications, running a response desk, a small development team, and a number of specialist consultants, as well as being the technical focus of the user group for around 150 customer organisations.

Nigel’s latter years at Oracle were spent as a roving business and technical consultant with special emphasis on technical audit and resolving intractable application performance problems for worldwide customers.

Nigel graduated with a BSc with honours in Computer Science with Mathematics from Bristol University in 1980. He is a Member of the British Computer Society (and has recently served as both Treasurer and Secretary of the BCS East Anglia branch) and a Chartered IT Professional.