Gerard is currently back to his roots in doing IT and business process consultancy in the telecom space. Some of the previous projects and clients are outlined below.
Gerard was recruited as Managing Director by Brentech in 2018. Long-established market leader, Brentech develops and supports logistics and warehousing solutions to large pharmaceutical wholesale and distribution companies like United Drug, Well plc, Mawdsley-Brooks and Sangers/AAH. Gerard was responsible for managing the key customer relationships, projects and achieving the revenue targets. Brentech was acquired by Principal Systems in December 2020.
Gerard worked as M&A Lead with Bluespier UK in 2015/16. He worked with the management team to prepare the company for sale, conducted the negotiations with prospective purchasers and guided Bluespier through due diligence and legal phases. This resulted in the acquisition of Bluespier by Clanwilliam Group in 2016. Bluespier’s solutions are the niche market leaders in hospital Theatre Management. Gerard had been a non-executive advisor to Bluespier since 2008 and he continues to advise sister-company Amplitude Clinical in a non-executive capacity.
In the past Gerard has worked on various projects with Digifone/O2 (1996-2004), meteor/eir (2005-2014), Vodafone (2015).
With Digifone/O2 (now Three), Gerard specialised in the commissions handling, device subsidy and upgrades entitlement processing systems. This family of solutions (MS Access front-end with Oracle back-end) were critical business systems for O2. Later projects included integrations with logistics partner Brightpoint – for whom Experience IT built both the Irish and Caribbean logistics solutions (mobile phone fulfilment).
Gerard worked on the development of Commissions Handling solutions for meteor (later acquired by eir). He also developed the credit scoring and vetting solution which integrated with the CRM systems. Gerard was intimately involved in device/SIM and other inventory solutions and the migration from the original fulfilment partner to another (including complex integrations). Gerard was a key technical lead on the successful 4G launch by eir – making it over the line ahead of all the rivals. Gerard launched a new coverage mapping initiative (still in use today!) and worked closely with the development and network team to iron out all the provisioning and middleware challenges in the early friendly user build releases. Subsequently, Gerard worked on GDPR and compliance initiatives as well as various customer care/billing solutions to improve customer experience. So quite a varied range of projects and roles over a 10 year engagement.
Earlier works and projects with meteor/eir include the design and build of Commissions Handling systems, Credit Scoring and Vetting solution, logistics (inventory management) and a lot of changes associated with the launch and success of iPhone on the meteor network. Gerard’s IHS solution (~30K LOC in pure SQL) created a series of business critical feeds to eir’s DWH to detail customer loyalty, device upgrades (and entitlements).
In 2004/5 – Gerard was the Technical Lead on Alphyra (now Payzone) project to develop a platform for prepay international top-up amongst members of the Starmap alliance (12 mobile operators across Europe). His (so-called) “test code” for EDR/billing records ended up moving across to production as bug free EDR processing and inter-operator (5-currency!) settlement engine. All written in pure MySQL scripts. (Did I mention I love SQL and databases especially Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server and MS Access?)
For the first seven years of Gerard’s career after graduating from TCD Computer Science in 1988 – he worked mainly in sales and marketing roles, and specifically in the accounting/logistics software solutions space. 5 years with GFK Technology (market leader Ireland – Take Five accounting and payroll), 1 with Typetec/Odyssey System (Proteus, Progress Open Systems accounting and ERP) and 2 years as Country Manager for Tetra Business Systems (UNIX based accounting/business solutions).