Gerd W. Naschenweng

Gerd is a first rate J2EE architect with skills in the management of people, vendors and service providers. He has added enormous value to clients by reducing their license revenue spend through innovative approaches and architecting solid solutions. He always has the client's interests at heart. His passion for technology extends beyond his professional capacity.

... the one thing I most enjoy having Gerd as a manager/team lead, is that we as a team can challenge each other to find best ways to solve complex problems. This I would say is greatly attributed to his highly technical knowledge. I have certainly learned a great deal from him and recommend his work with no hesitation.

Gerd has been in a contracting capacity with Vodacom performing vital roles in the establishment of systems architecture, execution of the implementation of architecture, migration of technology platforms centered around the WebSphere stack of technologies as well as other technology platforms. He is highly experienced in systems design, implementation and operation of these systems. He is extremely detail oriented and functions exceptionally well within a team environment as well as in an individual capacity. His relationship with his peers, superiors and direct reports are exceptional. Lastly his breadth of knowledge around information technology is vast, but he still manages an exceptional balance at a detail level in a fast paced environment.

During my employment at FNB as Head of Development J2EE (February 2004 to May 2005) I had the privilege of working quite closely with Gerd. He was instrumental in contributing to the successful stabilization of the "Cube" Java Framework, selection of a new Branch Automation Platform as well as the successful integration of my team from old to new standards and processes

... I think the greatest compliment a project manager can offer to a past staf member is the willingness to take that person to a new project: Mr. Naschenweng remains at the top of my list.

Business case:
Alturos Destinations provides with it's Peaksolution platform e-commerce and digitalisation solutions for the tourismus industry in the Alpine regions of Europe. As the Techlead for Peaksolution my role involves the management of the development pipeline across 3 teams with 25 engineers on-site and a 6 member remote-team located in Lviv, Ukraine.

With over 20 e-commerce installations across Austria, Italy, France and Switzerland I manage all development initiatives within Peaksolution for the the responsive, mobile and self-service channels. A highly agile team of engineers delivers up to 15 software releases per week.
The responsibilities include the technical lead and coordination of the B2B-, B2C- and Integration-team and to be the interface to project management, product management and support channels across the organisation.

Scope of work & projects:

• Non-disclosure
• Management of 30+ engineering staff covering all software development for the Peaksolution™ e-tourism platform.

Business case:
The main focus was to completely restructure bidorbuy's IT-operations which consisted in 2010 of five non-redundant servers without monitoring, backups or any DevOps. With limited budget the whole Java/Tomcat stack was reworked and deployed on high-available Xen clusters running on IBM BladeCenter infrastructure. The IT-team of three staff was upskilled to multi-functional teams consisting of 16 highly-skilled engineers who independently manage DevOps, mobile development (Android and iOS) and core Java development. An agile development process with continous integration using Atlassian JIRA, Bitbucket, Confluence, Jenkins was implemented to allow multiple deployments per day.

Scope of work & projects:

• Migration of Oracle Standard Edition transactional database to PostGres EnterpriseDB
• Private cloud-hosted IT architecture based on open-source technology (Apache, Tomcat, Java, Xen, CentOS)
• Performance tuning and optimisation of Java stack / Java Virtual Machine for Tomcat and Apache Solr to reduce GC-cycles, memory leaks and improve response times
• Implementation of e-commerce SEO- and SEM tooling including GTM, Merchant Centre integration, Rich cards
• Implementation of native e-commerce apps for Windows, Android, iOS, Blackberry
• Deployment of Apache Solr search stack for e-commerce search on 3,7m products with 10ms response time per query
• Deployment of ElasticSearch cluster for centralised log- & incident management via Graylog and Logstash processing 600msg/sec
• Deployment of e-commerce mail-infrastructure (PowertMTA / Port25) capable of transmitting up to 2m emails per hour
• Implemented DevOps infrastructure for e-commerce marketplace (New Relic, SaltStack, Zabbix, PagerDuty and in-house incident reporting)
• Full automation of SDLC and configuration management and continous integration using Jenkins and Atlassian (JIRA, Confluence, Fisheye, Bitbucket) on Java (MyEclipseIDE)
• Implementation of customer support system (Kayako) to service 1,2m customers per month
• Migration of 500m images in e-commerce product catalogue to Cloudinary
• Migration of all sites to SSL without loss of SEO ranking
• Management of 15 IT-staff covering all IT- and Ops-projects within the company

Business case:
Director for UbuntuDeal group buying (Groupon clone) with the focus on strategic Consulting, brand development, web site traffic growth, SEO and coordinating new development initiatives.

Business case:
Initially hired to design and implement a customer acquisition solution. Moved as acting manager and solutions architect into the design team and took over responsibility for application- and infrastructure architecture-solutions for Vodacom's customer channels (consumer, corporate, call-centres) comprising of 12 call-centres, 550 retail franchises and 15,000 users. Instrumental in the migration from old WebSphere stack, the implementation of a standardised webservices gateway and various cost-savings and open-source initiatives.

Scope of work:

• Responsible for managing the design team and defining architectural roadmaps and introducing technology enablers to maintain the company's competitive edge.
• Design/implementation of acquisition and score-card systems running on JEE standards
• Evaluation of replacement for Websphere product stack with Open Source solutions
• SOA initiatives to establish a service registry & repository, an enterprise integration bus
• Design/implementation of webservices gateway for B2B transactions
• Commercial negotiations with vendors (RFP, SOW, budgets)
• Application infrastructure design
• Design of a pre-production environment based on virtualisation technology comprising 16 logical partitions resembling five different pre-production environments
• SDLC and process improvement projects
• Design/implementation of Vodacom Business portal
• Implementation of legislative processes for PCI (Payment Card Industry), SOX and RICA
• Management of design team (15 employees), budgets, interactions with C-level and executive management

Business case:
Initially consulted as a Java/J2EE architect to implement architectural principles in the technology division of Branch Banking. Branch Banking Technology services a branch network consisting of 700 outlets and supports over 14,000 users. During the first engagement the scope of work changed to apply enterprise architecture principles, to streamline the software development life-cycle and to establish an IT strategy to support future business initiatives.

Scope of work:

• Resolved stability and performance issues in the current environment and improved scalability from 50 concurrent users to 1500 users.
• Assisted the infrastructure team with the design and implementation of a fully automated, clustered and fail-over Blade Centre environment.
• Architectural principles for SDLC supporting Risk & Governance
• Prepared and presented several business cases to support the improvement of the SDLC (Change Management, Problem Management, Application- & System Monitoring, Test Management).
• Facilitated the RFI/RFP process to replace the current branch software stack.
• Development of architecture strategy and roadmap to transform branch technology.
• Key-player in Risk & Governance to implement policies, guidelines and processes.
• Assisted in the ITIL assessment and provided recommendations. (ITIL champion for implementation)
• Architectural design of system infrastructure and involvement in Linux vs Windows proof-of-concepts.
• Definition of architectural roadmaps for Identity Management, Peripheral Integration via J/XFS.
• Business-case & implementation of web-presence/-usage monitoring in a Blade environment.

Business case:
BG Phoenics GmbH has developed a J2EE application for different social insurance groups in Germany. Scope of the project to perform system-testing during which the delivery project is evaluated for "production-readiness".

BG Phoenic's application is a document-centric solution which required scanning, recognition, indexing and management of 60,000 documents per hour.

Scope of work:

• Setup and extension of quality assuring activities.
• Performance optimisation and troubleshooting for applications.
• Development and customisation of LoadRunner scripts.
• Utilisation of privately developed "UniversalServer" - an extensible client-server framework to control load tests.
• Performance measurement and profiling using Wily Introscope.
• Performance tuning / problem resolution
• Performance tuning of infrastructure environment (especially MQ Workflow, DB2, IBM Websphere and JVM, Content Manager)
• Analysis of LoadRunner-test results.

Business case:
BG Phoenics GmbH has developed a J2EE application for different social insurance groups in Germany. Scope of the project is to support the production readiness project for the company during the hardware-tender process, mediate between the different hardware providers and produce results to facilitate the hardware selection process.

BG Phoenic's application is a document-centric solution which required scanning, recognition, indexing and management of 60,000 documents per hour.

Scope of work:

• Setup and extension of quality assuring activities.
• Performance optimisation and troubleshooting for applications.
• Management and co-ordination of the test-team (7 people).
• Development and customisation of LoadRunner scripts.
• Development of additional LoadRunner functionality to generate even load in test scenarios.
• Analysis of LoadRunner-test results.

Business case:
The Citizen Entrepreneurial Development Agency (= CEDA) is a government-funded agency to develop the business development in Botswana. The core business of CEDA focuses on the distribution of loans in the commercial-, property-, agricultural- and livestock sectors. The project included a loan-origination and appraisal process which interfaces into SAP and utilises the SAP portal server to present the web-based business application to the end-user.

Scope of work:

• Technical assistance in the last 4 weeks of the implementation phase to implement the appraisal models for commercial-, property- and agricultural loans.
• Design of the database model and generic access beans to store/retrieve business data via JDBC.
• Development of SAP portal-components (DynPage and JSPDynPage).
• Unit- and load-test of the components via JUnit.

Business case:
The Internet-application implemented under Visual Age for Java 3.5 and deployed on IBM Websphere Application Server 3.5 needed to be migrated to fully support the J2EE deployment standards. The project includes the migration of libraries and deployment scripts.

Scope of work:

• Technical assistance in migration of the Visual Age repository to IBM WebSphere Application Developer 5.0.
• Design of automated J2EE deployment into WebSphere Application Server 4.0 via ANT and Tcl and Jacl.
• Technical project management and coaching (managing a team of 5 developers, project-planning, business analysis/design).
• Performance and scalability tests via Mercury Loadrunner.
• Production link: https://maxnet.vhv.de

Business case:
A web-portal application should allow multiple insurance companies to share different authentication methods and provide a single-signon (SSO) for all partner applications. For this project a user is authentified and authorised via RSA SecurID or Kobil SecOVID and user-information is stored in LDAP.

Scope of work:

• Design and development of a model-view-controller application framework for the company.
• Design and development of a Java Native Interface to communicate with the RSA- and Kobil-Servers for authentication.
• Design and development of a XML-based configurable authentication framework.
• Performance and scalability tests via Mercury Loadrunner.
• Production link: https://www.vdg-portal.de

Business case:
Establish an Internet-portal to provide the insurance companies business processes to their insurance brokers and partners. The portal's functionality covers all aspects of an insurance-brokers requirements (change insurance details, customer details, file damage reports, enquiry of insurance contracts etc.).

Scope of work:

• Design and development of a model-view-controller application framework (XML based "Struts"-like MVC model 2) for the company.
• Design and development of the Java Middletier (servlets, Javabeans, JSP) to communicate with the mainframe via CICS Transaction Gateway to invoke legacy CICS transactions.
• Design and development of a XML-based communication infrastructure to transform COBOL copybooks into XML-beans.
• Design and development of a reporting framework based on Apache FOP to generate/transform PDF-documents and serve the documents via the browser.
• Design and development of a distributed Logging-Framework based on Apache Log4J and IBM MQSeries.
• Load balancing and scalability tests of the application via Mercury Loadrunner.
• Project production link: http://maxnet.vhv.de

Business case:
Proof of concept for the development of a web-based document management system. The project focused on the automatic processing of documents (letter, emails, fax etc.) via a web interface. Back-end processes included the archiving of new documents into a document server and retrieval functions to access documents from the optical Jukeboxes.

Scope of work:

• Design and development of a web-based application to retrieve document information from the mainframe via MQ Series and display the documents in a browser.
• Integration of APIs to retrieve documents via a servlet from optical storage.
• Development of a 3270 applet to enable users to capture additional information on in 3270 applications.
• Load tests with Mercury LoadRunner

Business case:
The Smart.com Microcompact Car Company (a Daimler-Chrysler company) manufactures and distributes in a franchise model the compact Smart-cars. In a restructuring exercise the company focused on launches into new markets.

Scope of work:

• Project management and coordination of the IT-franchise setup for the new market launches in UK, Japan and Taiwan.
• Setup of change-management procedures to coordinate the distribution of new functionality and updates to franchise outlets.
• Co-ordination and setup of a project office and delegation of tasks to team-leaders / project managers.

Business case:
Proof of concept to move the existing OS/2 based branch delivery system to a platform independent format.

Scope of work:

• Analysis, Design and Feasibility study to migrate a large (350+ branches) banking client-server system to Java.
• Development of a Java interface to communicate and exchange data with the mainframe via IBM CICS Transaction Gateway.

Business case:
Enhancing the OS/2 based client-server application to implement additional functionality to increase productivity at the banks branches.

Scope of work:

• Integration of the new Y2K compliant credit-card processing system.
• Management of implementation and rollout of major functional changes to the frontend system to all retail outlets.
• Analysis, Design and Implementation of the Instant Card Issue functionality to issue (print & encode) ATM cards in the branches.
• Management of the deployment of 200 card printers into the branch network (400+ branches).
• Analysis, Design and Implementation of the Teller System, which allows the banks branches to handle all monetary transactions real-time.
• Analysis, Design and Implementation of the "plug 'n play" Serial Port Interface, which enables the "hot-plugging" of any serial device. (This was implemented to launch new hardware quickly and to reduce administration and configuration efforts). As part of this project cash-dispensers, card-readers, cheque-readers and card-printers were deployed to 400+ branches nationwide.
• Analysis, Design and Implementation of the Print Monitor Interface which extends/replaces the functionality of the OS/2 Print Manager. Purpose of the project was to increase the speed of documents printed and to manage 5000+ printers in the branch network.

Business case:
Analysis and Design of business functionality for the Standard Bank of South Africa project.

Scope of work:

• Analysis, Design and Implementation of the Customer Information System to manage customer information and utilise key data for marketing purposes.
• Cross Selling Interface to support customer consultants in their marketing efforts.
• Development of the support-tool "BDRemote/32" to remotely control 800+ servers and 10,000+ desktops in the bank's branch infrastructure.