Sunday 16th August marked the 10th ‘Workiversary’ for our wonderful friend and colleague Mr Neil Deedman-Leeds.
David Pape, Director at Innovate said: “Today I have the absolute honour and pleasure to say thank you to Neil, on the occasion of his 10th anniversary with Innovate Ltd. He is a much respected and well liked member of our team and the place would just not be the same without him.”
Neil spoke about his career so far: “I started as a support engineer when Innovate was an IT Support Company. However, we soon started the cloud platform development project and, as I had past experience with data centres, I very quickly began working on the development of what would become our Cloud9 platform. Since then, because of my knowledge of the construct behind our platform, I have become the guy who implements changes and improvements to our data centres, as well as working on the larger customer migration projects.
“As a result, I must have been to Manchester (the site of our first and largest Data Centre) over 30 times in my 10 years. This has often seen me and Dave working late nights together, but at either end of the country; me making the changes to the physical infrastructure whilst Dave and the team are doing the changes to our systems.
“There is a running joke that every time I go to Manchester, it always seems to snow! As a result I am always sending the team pictures of ‘snow in Manchester’ as opposed to sunny Bournemouth. However, on one occasion I went up there in Summer, so to make up for the lack of snow, my colleague and I went to the Manchester indoor ski centre and took a couple of pics there.
Asked what he likes best about working for Innovate, Neil says: “There is definitely a real friendly team atmosphere in this company. We all enjoy each other’s company and regularly socialise together. It says something about the closeness of the team that David acted as my chauffeur at my wedding last year. We are very close in that respect.
In summing-up Neil’s contribution, David said: “He has worked on virtually all of the major cloud migration programs for all our largest customers and has become well known and respected by them as a result. He has also been integral in building the high performance cloud server arrays that power Innovate’s cloud platform. “As well as being a good friend, Neil is indeed a valuable member of our team. Here’s to the next 10 years!”