My Story

Most of my career has involved taking new communications, networking, or data technologies and turning them into systems that could be used in real businesses.

The industries changed over time, but the job was often similar: figure out what the technology made possible, define the system around it, build or organize the implementation, and stay with it long enough to make it work outside the lab.

The recurring work has been connecting distributed people, equipment, information, and computing resources, then turning those connections into reliable operational systems.

What I Do

Much of my work has happened before the market settled on the product, the operating model, or the business case. My skills are most effective when a technical capability is promising but the surrounding systems are still unclear: the customer problem, the architecture, the deployment path, the operational model, the integration points, the failure modes, or the practical route to commercial use.

My experience spans early Ethernet networking, satellite videoconferencing, VSAT communications, managed wide-area networks, remote medical-device monitoring, global maritime communications, satellite AIS, Internet software, ERP/e-commerce and Application Programming Interface (API) integration. In different roles I have sold, designed, built, deployed, operated, and supported systems that had to work beyond the slide deck and beyond the prototype.

Selected Systems and Ventures

Ungermann-Bass: Early Ethernet Networking

Shortly after graduating from Georgia Tech with a B.S. in Applied Physics, I joined Ungermann-Bass as a Sales Engineer. Ethernet was then an emerging technology for connecting computers across campus environments, and the work combined technical understanding, practical deployment, and customer requirements.

It was an early introduction to a problem I would continue to pursue: turning a promising technology into an operational system that solved a real problem.

Isacomm: Nationwide Satellite Videoconferencing

I next joined Isacomm, which was developing a nationwide network of sophisticated videoconferencing rooms connected through satellite communications. The system allowed participants in different cities to conduct meetings remotely, and the work put me around communications networks, satellite links, audiovisual systems, and geographically distributed facilities. This was before Zoom or FaceTime made such a capability seem ubiqutous.

My manager, Robert Reid, later moved to Scientific-Atlanta and recruited me there.

Scientific-Atlanta: Early Commercial VSAT

At Scientific-Atlanta, Robert Reid and I were key contributors to the company’s emerging Very Small Aperture Terminal product. The industry was still figuring out how small satellite terminals could economically connect thousands of geographically distributed commercial locations.

Scientific-Atlanta was one of a group we often referred to as the “Magnificent Seven”: companies competing to demonstrate VSAT technology and win Kmart’s business for a nationwide store communications network. That period became an important foundation for the next stage of my career.

Descendants of these early VSAT systems are still in use across the country and around the globe.

AvData Systems: Founder and Managed Network Services

Robert Reid, Paul Beavin, and I left Scientific-Atlanta and founded AvData Systems. We secured the company’s initial investors and built AvData into a provider of Shared Hub VSAT communications networks and managed network services.

Instead of simply selling communications equipment, AvData took responsibility for designing, deploying, operating, and managing customer networks. Customers included banks, retail chains, manufacturers, and major paging and wireless companies such as PageMart, PageNet, and MobileComm. One example was a nationwide satellite network for PageMart supporting its Narrowband PCS-based service.

Public records and contemporary reporting document parts of the AvData story, including FCC-derived station records, the reported PageMart VSAT infrastructure contract, and the 1999 merger into Interstate FiberNet, an ITC^DeltaCom subsidiary. FCC record | 55 Marietta hub record | RCR Wireless report | FTC early termination notice | Shenandoah Telecommunications 1999 Form 10-K excerpt

ResMed: ResTraxx Remote Patient Monitoring

After AvData, I developed a concept for remotely connecting sleep-apnea treatment devices to centralized clinical systems using Narrowband PCS wireless communications. I presented the concept to ResMed in approximately 2000. ResMed hired me and Donley P’Simer, a friend and accomplished software developer, to develop the system and bring it into the sleep-apnea marketplace. I served in product-development leadership for Telemedicine and Informatics.

The resulting system became part of a ResMed product path that included SomnoTraxx and ResTraxx. Its basic architecture connected CPAP equipment in patients’ homes through a nationwide wireless messaging network to centralized servers and databases, allowing healthcare providers to remotely review treatment and compliance information. Later versions supported bidirectional device management.

Independently documented evidence is strongest around the product lineage, not my individual role. FDA records trace continuity from SomnoTraxx and ResTraxx Online through EasyCare Online to AirView, while ResMed’s current site describes AirView as a secure cloud-based patient management system for sleep-disordered breathing and respiratory insufficiency. That lineage identifies ResTraxx as an early connected-device, cloud, and remote-patient-monitoring architecture. ResMed AirView | FDA K030797 – SomnoTraxx | FDA K083816 – ResTraxx Online | FDA K093684 – EasyCare Online | FDA K151901 – AirView

Globe Wireless: Global Maritime VSAT

In 2007, Mark Witsaman, a lead customer engineering executive from Mobilecomm during my time at AvData working on Narrow Band PCS and then a senior engineering executive at Globe Wireless, recruited me based on my previous VSAT and managed-network experience. Globe Wireless already provided communications equipment and services to commercial shipping worldwide. The goal was to introduce broadband VSAT services aboard commercial vessels, with an early focus on crew morale, communications, and entertainment similar to services becoming common aboard cruise ships.

I designed significant portions of the shipboard VSAT system and developed a modular production process intended to make deployment and installation aboard vessels relatively fast and repeatable. I also developed remote control and monitoring capabilities that integrated the VSAT platform with other shipboard systems, enabling continuous two-way communications and remote management of equipment that previously depended largely on intermittent communications while vessels were at sea.

Public Globe Wireless materials from that period describe a global maritime communications business and later show the same architectural direction: VSAT integrated with business and crew communications, onboard systems control, segregated networks, VoIP, GSM, backup links, and ongoing support. Singtel release | MarineLink Globe Wireless archive | Mark Witsaman patent listing

exactEarth: Global Satellite AIS Infrastructure

In 2009, Eric Meger, whom I had worked with when he was at Glenayre and AvData was working with paging and Narrowband PCS systems, recruited me from Globe Wireless to help build what would become exactEarth. I initially joined as a Senior Consultant and later became Vice President, Operations and Engineering.

exactEarth used custom-designed satellite-based sensors to detect and collect Automatic Identification System signals required to be emitted by maritime vessels globally. Those signals contain vessel-position and identification information, which we processed and delivered to commercial and government customers around the world.

My responsibilities included implementing and deploying the satellite constellation, worldwide ground-station network, data-processing infrastructure, data centers, communications infrastructure, and the operating organization necessary to deliver a continuously available global service. I was also part of the executive management team during the process that took exactEarth public, with its common shares beginning to trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2016.

Public exactEarth and trade sources document the satellite-AIS constellation, EV-5 and EV-9 launches, ground-station expansion, the public listing, and the later acquisition by Spire. SatNews EV-5 launch coverage | EV-9 launch release | Sea Tel ground-station coverage | TSX listing release | SEC filing on Spire’s exactEarth acquisition

Rebuilding Hands-On Software Capability

After leaving exactEarth and returning to the United States following nearly a decade in Canada, I explored numerous corporate opportunities. My unusually broad career proved difficult to represent in a conventional resume, and I chose a different direction.

Several entrepreneurial concepts I wanted to explore required software even to reach prototype stage. Although I understood software architecture and systems well, years away from hands-on programming meant that my implementation skills had not kept pace with modern software languages, frameworks, and development tools. I decided to correct that.

Through self-study, experimentation, consulting, and contract work, I rebuilt my practical software-development capability using modern Internet technologies and tools.

Oventus Medical: E-Commerce, Integration, and NetSuite

Robin Randolph, a former ResMed colleague, later brought me into Oventus Medical as an independent contractor. Oventus was introducing an Australian-developed oral sleep-apnea treatment into the U.S. market.

I built a WooCommerce-based ordering system for dentists, integrated it with NetSuite using Celigo, and became the company’s NetSuite specialist. That work became the foundation for an independent NetSuite and Internet-software consulting practice.

AMPM LLC: Independent Software and NetSuite Practice

This independent practice focusses on development, implementation and operation of PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, NetSuite administration, SuiteScript development, WordPress, WooCommerce, APIs, and systems integration. The practice gives me useful and often interesting technical work while preserving freedom to pursue other projects and selective advisory work.

The Common Thread

Looking back, the same problem shows up in very different settings. A new technical capability appears. It is interesting, but not yet useful by itself. Someone still has to decide what system should exist around it and how that system will be built, sold, installed, operated, and supported.

The endpoint changed over time: campus computers, videoconferencing rooms, retail and commercial locations, paging systems, CPAP machines in patients’ homes, shipboard systems, satellites, ground stations, and business software platforms.

The thread is the work of connecting distributed people, equipment, information, and computing resources and turning those connections into reliable operational systems.