12290 87th Street North               954.448.0077

West Palm Beach, FL 33412               rickazoy@outlook.com

 

 

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LEADER

 

Proven ability to shape IT performance and responsiveness to business needs with prominent contributions to customer satisfaction, solution architecture and cost control. Performance-focused Information Technology Strategist with over 15 years experience adept at bridging organizational levels and delivering results. Noted for the ability to lead design, development, and implementation of complex, reliable, and scalable systems in support of core business objectives. Highly successful in solving business issues while delivering applications, infrastructure and reducing costs and risks. Solid Management skills, capable of leading and motivating individuals to maximize levels of productivity forming cohesive team environments.

 

·         Identified as key IT leader after turning around department performance and stabilizing infrastructure services to achieve 100% compliance with SLAs.

·         Reduced IT expenditures by $2.5M annually by negotiating several key maintenance contracts, with potential additional savings of $4M by implementing energy saving initiatives nationwide.

·         Oversaw solution architecture, information security and IT Operations within a $20B company and spearheaded team responsible for e-commerce system generating over $2B in revenue per year.

·         Spearheaded large data center migration and complete infrastructure/security redesign for over 18,000 employees and 250 business critical systems and applications while reducing IT Data Center operations budget by $1M per year.

 

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

 

·         Information Technology ·         Security Assessments ·         Project Management ·         Strategic Planning ·         Security architecture ·         Converged Architectures

·         Technology Assessments ·         Risk Assessments ·         Root Cause Analysis ·         Architecture & Design ·         System & Application Debugging ·         Continuous Integration and Deployment

·      Security Forensics ·      Team Building ·      High Availability Planning ·      SLA Standards & monitoring ·      Budget Management ·      IaaS

 

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

 

Ultimate Software, Weston, FL               2012 - Current

Leading provider of human resources, payroll, and talent management solutions.

 

Director, Emerging Technology

 

®          Defined the company’s technology assessment methodology

®          Experience in architecting solutions for both public and private cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services

®          Researched, evaluated, and identified appropriate technology platforms for delivering the company’s services.

®          Lead strategic planning to achieve business goals by identifying and prioritizing cloud initiatives and setting timetables for the evaluation, development, and deployment of all cloud services

®          Participated as a member of the senior management team in establishing governance processes of direction and control to ensure that objectives are achieved, risks are managed appropriately and the organization’s resources are used responsibly.

®          Provided technical leadership for a team responsible for researching, prototyping, architecting, and delivering scalable IaaS solutions based on OpenStack and VMWare vCloud.

®          Provided technical leadership for the design and implementation of innovative architectures and continuous deployment pipelines leveraging up to date technologies like OpenStack, Chef, TeamCity, and VMWare vCloud.

®          Led the design and implementation of System Center Operations Manager to provide application and business transaction monitoring for Ultimate’s cloud environment

®          Implemented a scale-out architecture using commodity hardware and VMWare vCloud that resulted in a 200% cost savings over previous architecture

®          Worked closely with enterprise architects and developers to select technologies that supported the latest cloud application constructs

 

 

SeaView Research, Miami, FL               2009 - 2012

Clinical Research company providing Phase I and early Phase II clinical pharmacology testing to the pharmaceutical and biotech industries.

 

Chief Information Officer

Responsible for the management and deployment of all technology related initiatives and strategy for all divisions within SeaView Research.

 

®          Architected a clinical management solution using SOA to integrate key business and clinical systems to provide a cohesive solution for managing all aspects of clinical trials.

®          Designed a business continuity infrastructure using VMware’s Fault Tolerance feature across the WAN with real time synchronization of memory and CPU cycles.

®          Designed and implemented a custom software development lifecycle that complies with all requirements under FDA part 11 and HIPAA

®          Designed an employee and vendor based portal using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

®          Architected a resilient and reliable infrastructure and medical cart deployment to facilitate an electronic delivery of all clinical activities within a clinical trial.

 

 

 

AUTONATION, INC., Fort Lauderdale, FL               1999 - 2009

Largest Automotive retailer in the US with over 18B in annual sales

 

Director, Infrastructure

Directed Information Technology operations and infrastructure within an $18B company in retail automotive space. Provided day-to-day technical leadership for all Infrastructure systems (Security, Database operations, Systems Architecture, Messaging, Application Engineering, Citrix, Storage Architecture and Client Architecture) and managed a multi-million dollar annual budget.

 

®          Designed and implemented multi-billion dollar e-commerce system for lead management and vehicle fulfillment

o        This was comprised of an n-tier architecture with Web servers hosting the web services for lead validation and response, .Net application servers using custom load balancing for all lead processing and a SQL Cluster for all write operations and certain lead post validation

®          Led several large key projects including IIS, Exchange, Firewall, Storage and Database cluster migrations and Citrix application upgrades for all 18,000 employees

o        Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003 after performing an extensive evaluation on other competing solutions

o        Firewall upgrade to support increased traffic and allow us to perform more application level filtering

o        Large web farm migration from IIS 5 and 6 and Network Load Balancing to IIS 7 and Citrix Netscaler for load balancing

o        Large storage re-architecture to provide a multi-tier offering based on performance needs: This consisted of several SAN frames from SATA to SSD drives for extreme I/O needs and provided a lower tier for all archiving needs

o        Created several large Active/Active and Active/Passive clusters to meet all business Recovery Time Objectives including one of the first SQL 2005 responsible for processing over 1M transactions per hour

o        Tested, piloted and upgraded Office and other business critical applications via Citrix for all users in a phased migration

®          Spearheaded large data center migration in 6 months for over 18,000 employees and 250 business critical systems and applications while reducing IT Data Center operations budget by $1M per year

o        Conducted several interviews and visits of major data centers and created an evaluation matrix for the selection process

o        Designed the data center layout for power efficiency, future growth, remote out of band management and network resiliency thus creating a lights out facility and reducing our annual labor costs by $200K

o        Negotiated data center contract to achieve a reduction on our annual operating budget of $1M

o        Re-designed the network layout for security while allowing improved performance between systems

o        Created a multi-phased data center migration plan with key milestones to ensure readiness state and both technical and user verification prior to each cutover phase

o        Created a custom end user monitoring agent to test and measure response time between current data center and new facility in order to simulate latency and packet loss

®          Designed Core infrastructure and Security to support client base of 18,000 systems across the US

o        Consisting of the McAfee Security suite and GPO to lock down the machines by leveraging firewall, disabling auto-run, NetBIOS from all field locations and providing rogue sensor agents to detect for anomalies and un-protected systems

o        Network based IPS and regular vulnerability scanning against all key client and server subnets

o        Incident response team and process to deal with any security threats, these efforts were effective in preventing over 500 attacks of the Conficker worm

®          Designed and rolled out new architecture for various business critical systems to guarantee resiliency and increasing uptime from 90% to 99.99%

o        This consisted of several health checks, load testing and custom application monitoring jobs to determine hot spots and areas of focus

®          Partnered with executive and IT leadership to develop and commit resources to key business initiatives

®          Managed all enterprise HW / SW vendor contracts, negotiations and professional service engagements

®          Designed business / IT alignment process around ITIL and MOF 2.0 / 3.0 to streamline and better manage projects and spending

o        Created a form and process for approving all business and infrastructure projects using MOSS 2007 and InfoPath with Workflows

o        Worked together with finance to create a charge back model for all virtualization projects

®          Created Disaster Recovery plan engaging key business sponsors to determine appropriate RTO and RPOs. Created multi-layered DR strategy

®          Created Security Risk Assessment and Architect Council to discuss and tackle major risks and issues by providing a Risk Statement and working with the business to gauge the business impact and set priorities

®          Responsible for meeting SOX and PCI regulations and worked with auditors on obtaining SOX compliance

 

®          Initiated virtualization and consolidation efforts to reduce IT Budget and improve system availability

o        This was done with VMware ESX on DELL 2950s and allowed us to achieve a 15:1 consolidation effort thus reducing our annual hardware maintenance by $200K

 

®          Proactively provided problem identification and resolution for application and server issues including automating monitoring and notification for potential service level breaches before they occurred

o        Designed a logical map of our infrastructure for all system and application monitoring

o        Created an escalation workflow to handle multiple communication mediums if an alert was not acknowledged within the agreed upon SLA

o        Created a monitoring gap assessment process to close the loop on all issues and ensure the proper level of monitoring

Created a patch management process and communication plan to move from quarterly to a monthly cycle

 

HEICO AEROSPACE, Hollywood, FL               1997 - 1999

Leading supplier of FAA approved replacement parts

 

Lead Systems Engineer

Responsible for infrastructure systems and end users.

®          Performed all aspects of system builds and testing, system operations and patch management for over 400 employees and 15 servers.

®          Deployed multi-layered application environment

o        This was key for all collaboration between various engineering teams and provided a workflow for handling all plan changes

®          Administered and managed all Windows NT systems, SQL Database and Messaging system

®          Spearheaded the build out of several new facilities encompassing all aspects of Infrastructure build out

o         

EDUCATION

 

Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Engineering

Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL

 

CERTIFICATIONS

 

Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MSCE)

A+

Currently pursuing Six Sigma Black Belt

 

TECHNICAL EXPERTISE

 

Hardware:              DELL, HP and IBM servers, NOKIA IP 650, 740, 560s, EMC Storage solutions, Citrix Netscaler and Foundry Load Balancers

Systems:              Firewalls, Host and Network Based IPs, Windows XP, Vista and 7, Windows Server 2000, 2003, 2008 and Linux

Software:              Project Server 2007, Exchange Server 2003, 2007, SharePoint Server 2007, SQL Server 2000, 2005, MOM 2005 and System Center Operations and Configuration Manager 2007, McAfee EPO, Symantec AV, Forefront Security Suite, Sophos, VMware ESX, Citrix 4.0, 4.5 and XenApp 5, Microsoft DPM, WanSynch, IPS, Altiris and HP Openview