About Me

Started my career at sea, and spent ten years as a navigator. Came ashore in '85 and went into computing. I spent around seven years in the US, working for Johnson&Johnson healthcare, and a long stint for DuPont, based in Virginia.

In 1995, I recognised an opportunity to fill a missing piece in Microsoft's strategy, and that was to provide connectivity between MS-Mail as it was then known, and the internet. I went on to sell some 287,000 seats worldwide, with dealers in 18 countries.

I moved back to the UK at the end of 2000 and took up a role with BT. I spent three years there, in various roles, starting as an Operations manager, and ending up as head of BT's corporate mobile systems, having built the system from the ground up.

I then took a role with LogicaCMG, winning deals of 10m+, and thereafter a spell at Computer science corporation, building pipelines of 100m.

While I liked the huge salaries and bonuses, I wasn't been true to myself. In August of last year, I started out on my own, and having a ball ever since. Now instead of deals in millions, I'm working in thousands, but don't mind at all, because I'm back where I'm happiest, working with technology.

I came up with the name Noble, from a comment made by one of my first customer's who said 'the thing we like about you is that there's no bull'. And that's always been my philosophy, if I don't know something, I'm not afraid to admit it, but my customers know that with my technical contacts, I can find out the answers to just about anything.

While I consider myself expert in most things technical, I'm not hard nosed enough on the sales side, heck I can't be good at everything. One of the first things I shall be doing, once I can justify the cost, is hiring a sales director, leaving me to get on with the technical side of things.

If you've been to the company website, you know that I'm focusing on VOIP. Why? Because it's the future! Am I taking about Skype? No, in my view, Skype is useful, in that it is doing a good job of educating people. The issue is, Skype uses a proprietary wide bandwidth protocol, which is why it sounds so good. However, in a business situation, it's not really suitable. Apart from the bandwidth issues, as has just been mentioned, it's proprietary; all calls go through centralised databases. In fairness Skype does what it says on the can, it's great as a P2P product. But what if you want to leverage VOIP in your business? We use the open SIP standard for our products. This allows you to utilise open source products to build state of the art PBX systems with facilities that would cost upwards of £20,000 for a fraction of the cost. But to be honest, VOIP is the easy part. Connecting offices via VPN's, ensuring QOS (making sure the voice data gets through) is the hard part. A successful VOIP implementation is therefore a combination of skill sets. The company I've put together now has the requisite skills in place. My goal is to spread the word.

In the next few years, the concept of paying for distance will simply disappear.