Network Heroes Award Winners
The unsung heroes of the network world had their day when an esteemed group of individuals were awarded Network Hero Awards by Spirent at a glittering reception held at The Churchill War Rooms in Whitehall, London on 22nd September, 2011.
The judges selected more than 20 finalists from a wide-range of consulting companies, service providers, equipment makers as well as businesses with unique enterprise networks—all of which involved network heroes who addressed challenges resulting in superior outcomes for their employers. Nominees were chosen from BAE Systems, BBC, British Telecom, Cable & Wireless, Cambridge Broadband Networks, Cisco, Huawei, ITSUS Consulting, Juniper Networks, Marlow Enterprises, Paradigm, Steria, Thomson Reuters, Virgin Media Business and Verizon.
Spirent Network Hero Award winners in each category are:
| Hero Category |
Network Hero |
Citation |
| Firewall/Cyber/Security |
Gerard Garrihy, Cisco
|
“Our winner is always looking at new ways to test the security on his company’s products, and continually finding novel ways to test a vast array of customer configurations. He has risen to the extensive test challenge caused by the enterprise move to virtual machines and the added dimension of complexity that challenge brings, superbly. No matter how much pressure this guy is under he always finds the time to explain procedures and answer questions for colleagues and customers." |
| Test Automation |
Adrian Marlow,
Marlow Enterprises (award accepted by Simon Cummings)
|
"The most notable thing about our winner in this category is that when talking about networks, testing and any other form of communication it is a kin to talking to an evangelist at an old time revival meeting! He wants what is best for everyone—not just the company’s bottom line—but how the customer receives the care and attention they deserve and will talk (preach) at great length on how this can be achieved at the best possible cost. At times he can come across as an A-class Geek and in fact in many ways he is, but that is only because he lives and breathes networks and communication, and wants what is best for all concerned, and he knows that by testing and making sure it works correctly that is the best way of achieving his aim.” |
| Cloud |
John Hastwell,
Cisco
|
“This person’s work in this company’s competitive team is legendary; his extensive technical knowledge enables him to show the product equipment to its full capability, in demanding circumstances. Moving into a virtualised environment has increased the challenges our winner has had to master—and he willingly passes this knowledge on to customers.” |
| Proof of Concept & Pre-Sales Support |
John Easy,
Cambridge Broadband Networks
|
“A case in point—why this person should win this award. He recently put together a large-scale lab for an eastern European customer at two days notice! Before he could put the lab together for the customer, he had to strip his own lab and reconfigure the new lab over a weekend—above and beyond the call of duty!” |
| Network Design/Architect |
Trevor Abrams, Verizon
|
“This winner has the unenviable pressurized job of being responsible for the trading application performance at the LSE, and as such, is quickly able to recognise bandwidth performance issues on the existing network infrastructure. The infrastructure supporting the Trading application was intermittently suffering from poor performance which was proving very difficult to isolate the true cause of the problem. But this person identified a way. Having developed the ability to truly test applications and various bandwidths, has provided the LSE with a resilient application infrastructure platform.” |
| Test Leader/Evangelist |
Jan Seymour, Steria
|
"This person’s hard work has been instrumental with the set-up and configuration of a government reference system for all MOD communication contracts to ensure all systems meet the required standards. There were a number of communication contracts within the Government sector all working to different parameters, and thanks to our winner—the setup and use of this reference site ensure they all can co-exist, and the communication system can be fully interoperable with each other, therefore saving time, money, and manpower in the theatre of operation." |
| Special Award |
Alan Way, Spirent
|
A special “Technology Globetrotter Network Hero” award was also presented to Alan Way of Spirent Communications by his colleagues for his unique evangelism of voice and data networking technologies around the globe.
|
“These awards were created to applaud the individual, and we certainly achieved that at the recent Awards Ceremony” said David Hill VP EMEA Spirent Communications. “It was great to see winners from across the industry stepping forward to take the applause of their fellow colleagues and industry peers, and rightly so. This is the first year we’ve run these awards and we were delighted by the number and quality of the nominations received. This award scheme obviously has resonated within the industry and we’re delighted to be part of it.”
To underline the award’s prestige, David Clarke MBE, Chief Executive of the BCS–The Chartered Institute for IT–chaired the eminent judging panel, which included: Camille Mendler, Principal Analyst and Head of Enterprise Verticals Informa, Eric Owen, Vice President, Telecommunications IDC EMEA and Tim Ring Editorial & Operations Director of the National Computing Centre, and Editor Conspectus.
