Alan Claughan

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT ALAN CLAUGHAN

A few random facts about me: I have always been interested in technology. I was that guy, that was for ever stripping down the family toasters, clocks, radios to understand how they worked. I even managed to restore some of them back to their working condition :) My career started in a South African Telco, where I learnt to install and maintain various telecommunications equipment. I later headed up the \'Special Projects\' division, which was responsible for the design and manufacture of digital transmission devices. My studies gave me insight into the world of electronics, but I taught myself the intricacies of micro computers. For the last 30+ years I have worked at Dimension Data. I started when there were a handful of people and now we are well over We have branches in nearly 60 countries and in 2010, we were acquired by NTT. Over the years I have programmed in various languages, assembler, bash ( many shells), C, C++, Perl, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python to name a few. In 1993 I got my CCIE certification from Cisco. I completed the test / lab by mistake. I had no idea what it was about, my boss told me to head for Cisco for some type of test. When I left the Cisco Office, the proctor told me I was a CCIE and I had no idea what that was :) My CCIE gave me access to the best toys. I have designed, installed, maintained and monitored every type of equipment. From SNA, FDDI, X.25, Token Ring, Arcnet, Ethernet, DWDM optical networks, Voice, Wireless. There\'s not many technologies I haven\'t played with. There is much talk these days about software defined networking, I have been automating networks from the beginning, just the scripting language changes and the location of the code. I was a firm believer in doing things once and automating the rest. I generate most of my documentation using script files. I have worked around the world on most of the large networks out there! I spent the last 3 years working in the NTT innovation labs in California.