Gareth has 21 years’ experience in IT, 14 years of which was working as a Progress DBA.
Gareth started his career as a junior field technician working for CRL computers in 1995. As a junior technician, he worked on AS400 peripherals, performing on-board repairs to Dump terminals and printers, before working his way into networking on NT4 systems.
To further his growth in IT, Gareth joined Automate, a division of Dimension Data, in 1999. Here, he joined as a PS consultant, implementing Dealer Management Systems throughout Africa. After 2 years he transferred to the Technical department to continue his passion for OS management and networking, and soon started gaining experience as a Progress DBA. 2 years later he was promoted to Systems Administrator and successfully carried out multiple projects, which included:
- Roll out of Windows 2000 active directories for over 40 servers
- Implementation of Terminals Services
- Upgrade of exchange 2000 to exchange 2003 and then later to 2010.
- Upgrade of character system to GUI (Telnet to RDS)
- Implementation of Proxy, Exchange, AD, SUS, FTP and RAS servers
- Converting and upgrading Progress 7 products to 9, 10 and later to 11.5.
- Streamlined deployment processes with the use of bash and ant scripting
- Implementation of OE Management
- Upgraded on premise customers running SCO Openserver to Centos
- Implementation of VMware infrastructure to host over 50 Windows 2003 terminal servers
- Progress client/server to Webclient Appserver implementation.
After 15 years working at Automate, he was then headhunted by Dovetail, a leading company in warehousing and transport software in South Africa, to assist with their modernization project. He was employed as a Senior Progress DBA and worked closely with the DEV team to streamline their deployment process and to fine tune their Databases for optimal performance.
A year later he was headhunted once again by Automate to rejoin them in their modernization team to assist with some challenging tasks to roll out their new modernized software. Here, he has played a key role in assisting the roll out of over 350 Databases by converting them from 10.2b to 11.5.1. Working closely with the Development team, he assisted with the implementation of a background down-loader/installer which allowed for the upgrade of over 1200 desktops from Webclient 10.2b to Webclient 11.5.1.
He continues to play a major role in managing over 800 DB’s in the Datacenter, a mixture of both legacy systems running Progress 9.1e and the latest product running OE 11.5.
Gareth spends much of his leisure time with his family and friends. He also enjoys hiking and camping and the occasional game of golf or squash over the weekends.