Aaron McConnell

Responsible for global service delivery and incident response for mission-critical systems hosted on AWS, Azure, GCP and IBM Cloud. This requires elite-level, highly-scalable operations with a low transaction cost. The organisation also includes an Operations Enablement team responsible for on-going solutions development to reduce manual effort, reduce risk, provide better visibility and ensure customer satisfaction. Also responsible for Problem Management across all hyperscalers.

• Leading 2 teams - 24*7 global NetDevOps / CentralOps comprising of over 60 people.
• Lead NetDevOps team which offers service delivery across all 3 major public cloud platforms and incident response for critical, customer-facing, revenue-generating services with a demand of over >23,000 requests in 2023 and >31,000 in 2024.
• Built teams, from ground up, and set an elite standard for operations for all hyperscaler-related services.
• Ensured teams are leaders in operations automation, both for service delivery, incident response, and observability.
• Spearheaded automation including hyperscaler suite, which delivers automated service delivery, automated incident diagnostics, hyperscaler monitoring and alerting, and live service status dashboards.
• Designed CentralOps 3rd party engagement model to ensure complete and seamless integration of L2/L2.5 teams within SAP.
• Transformed Hyperscaler Problem Management to ensure LoBs are provided with critical technical insights when deep-diving into SAP-impacted hyperscaler outages. Now dealing with >40 hyperscaler outages per quarter.

• Responsible for processing of hyperscaler network tickets related to key Multi Cloud services.
• Focused on automated service delivery via Terraform.
• Transitioned to team lead in January 2020 and built the team to support ECS hyperscaler customer connectivity.

• Formed startup with no initial customers but had >200 customers within 3 years.
• Designed, developed and deployed enterprise network solutions.
• Became the largest network solutions provider to the agricultural market in Northern Ireland.
• Designed and deployed a market-first solar-powered WiFi solution.

• Technical Lead Cloud and Network Research Associate for University of Ulster, the lead partner within the India-UK Advanced Technology Centre (IU-ATC).

• Achieved a full PhD scholarship with British Telecom - the first of its kind in the UK.
• Designed and built a highly-scalable observability system for compute, network and storage resources within VMware, OpenStack and CloudStack.
• Designed and built a regional latency monitoring solution for private cloud.
• Designed and built an automated distributed landscape deployment engine based on an engineered genetic algorithm.
• All solutions were deemed commercially valuable which resulted in patent applications and a ban on whitepapers or academic publications.

• Responsible for development of OpenCAR software – a natively-compiled, multi-platform tool for 2D analysis and 3D reconstruction of objects of interest in images of histological slices.