Kirk McGowan

About Kirk McGowan

Top tier technology professional with extensive IT industry experience leading highly distributed and technical teams and organizations. Extensive experience in consulting delivery, product development & engineering, and technical presales, servicing software, healthcare, education, oil & gas, and public sector industries.Proven performer and strong leader, with excellent communication skills, and deep technical understanding. Principled and rational decision maker. Passionate about technology, innovation, and delivering business value with technology. Extensive experience building and managing globally distributed engineering team and North American consulting teams. 10 years experience in technical presales, in both account/territory focused and technology focused roles.Broad technical background that includes Cloud, infrastructure, technical architecture, application design & development, systems programming & administration, network administration, database administration, and facilities management in both large scale and small scale systems and data center environments. Career emphasis on high availability and scalable systems design. Current focus is on public cloud adoption, cloud security, software defined networking, and DevOps/SecOps.Unwaivering commitment to customer service, team success, business ethics, and individual integrity. Experienced in consultative and solution selling: Demonstrated success in working with customers to understand their business requirements, map those to appropriate technology and services, and deliver value while mitigating risks.Past speaker at various regional, national, and international conferences (OOW, IOUG, etc) on RAC and related technologies, and a contributor to past publications on Oracle RAC.Specialties: Cloud Computing, Cloud Security, Engineered Systems, high availability architecture and design, clustering, fault tolerance, scalable systems design, technology assessment, IT Operations, technology evangelism, leadership and team building, technology risk management, alignment of business and technology.

Experience

1. Senior Director - North America Cloud Engineering, Security, Networking, and Infrastructure Services

   Oracle

   Dec 2020 — Present

Education

• University of Victoria

  Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science

  1980 — 1985

• Oak Bay High School

  Honours(AP) in Math and Sciences

  1976 — 1980

Skills

• Data Center
• Exadata
• Oracle Rac
• Architecture
• Technical Architecture
• Technology Evangelist
• Solution Architecture
• Integration
• Databases
• Grid Computing
• Data Warehousing
• High Availability
• Soa
• IT Management
• Pre-Sales
• Technology Evangelism
• Oracle
• Cloud Computing
• Clustering
• Enterprise Architecture
• Technology Evaluation
• Cluster
• IT Operations
• Solaris
• Software Development
• Scalability
• Performance Tuning
• Enterprise Risk Management