About me…

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Hi, my name is Wayne Horkan and I’m the Chief Technologist for the UK and Ireland at Sun Microsystems.

I’ve been at Sun for almost eight years and in my current role for just over two years.

The role I have covers three main areas: Customer and Partner engagements (helping develop systems), Awareness and Adoption (helping to make people more aware of Sun and Sun technologies), and Architectural and Solution Quality (help to ensure we reduce risk by using Standardization).

Before being assigned my current role I spent most of my time at Sun in Sun’s delivery organization, directly delivering systems and helping people in the adoption of technology. Whilst I’ve been at Sun I’ve always been part of what Sun call Customer Engineering (CE, although it also gets called Field Engineering or FE), this is the field organization which works directly with customers, in comparison to Product Engineering (PE) who innovatively develop our new technologies.

Being at Sun has given me wonderful opportunities to work at a senior level on some of the largest, most diverse and interesting, systems in the world, with some of the best technologists, business people and consultants, including:

  • SOA Design and ‘transformation roadmap’ for one of the largest UK Government organisations.
  • Identity system for an early SOA at one of the worlds largest investment banks (over 42,000 users across over 30 major systems).
  • Consolidation of 5000+ servers at another large investment bank (based out of Canary Wharf).
  • A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) engagement with a very large ISP.
  • Technical Design Authority (TDA) and Technology Leader brought in as a White Kinght at a Data Centre build out which up until then had gotten eight months behind schedule.
  • The Governance design for Sun’s largest customer engagement.

Before working at Sun I spent almost three years as the Chief Architect for Harrods, building amongst other things Harrods Online (v1 and v2, v1 was MS Commerce Server based if you remember that, whilst v2 was Sun and Vignette based).

Prior to Harrods I worked at Keane Inc., a Systems Integrator (SI), as a Technical Consultant. I spent time at Sun Life Assurance (now AXA) building a workflow and document imaging (scanning) solution, and at East Midlands Electricity (EME, followed by PowerGen, currently E.On) developing messaging subsystems and front end applications as part of the deregulation of the Gas and Electricity industries (the 19M programme as it was called).

I also spent a couple of years at Touch Systems, writing software to improve manufacturing process quality and cost, utilizing hand held data collectors, a shop floor network application environment and Statistical Process Control (SPC).

Outside of Sun I also work with a CDFI charity called Street UK, and I give (limited) advice to a CDFI collective called the Fair Finance Consortium.

I’m a supporter of professional membership organisations, and am a member of the British Computer Society (BCS), the Institue of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the Insitute of Directors (IoD), the Lunar Society and the Information Technologists Company (ITC).

Contact details

You can get in touch with me here: wayne.horkan-AT-sun-DOT-com

About this site

This site is my personal weblog, hosted and provided by Sun Microsystems, my employer.

This blog is governed by the Sun’s blogging policy, or the Sun Guidelines on Public Discourse as it’s called.

Many thanks to Linda Skrocki who recently wrote about Sun’s Revised Blogging Policy (AKA Guidelines on Public Discourse).

Disclaimer

This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer, Sun Microsystems (or Sun Microsystems UK).

Copyright

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Copyright 2007-2008, Wayne T. Horkan (wayne dot horkan at sun dot com).

FAQ

“I’d like you to come and present to my organisation on…”

  • Sun’s product portfolio, strategy, etc.
  • Futurology.
  • Enterprise Architecture.

Get in touch (see above) and lets talk.