An invited speaker on four continents, Jaqui has over twenty eight years experience in the Information Technology Industry. She began as a Cobol programmer, working for the New Zealand Government. However, she soon found her true calling, and moved into systems programming (systems administration) on large-scale IBM mainframes running a wide variety of operating systems including DOS/VSE, VM and MVS.
In 1985, Jaqui branched out into systems consulting, where she continued to expand her experience in systems design and administration. Jaqui has worked for many government departments and numerous financial institutions including the Bank of New Zealand, Databank NZ, Chase Manhattan Bank (Australia), the Department of Labor and NZ Railways.
Jaqui also has valuable experience working for the other side - hardware vendors, specifically Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) who sell IBM plug compatible mainframes. Jaqui was the Senior Systems Engineer responsible for pre- and post-sales software support for processors. She also ran training courses on MVS, VSAM, CICS and networking software for Hitachi hardware engineers throughout the Asia-Pacific region. During this time, Jaqui honed her skills in crafting disaster recovery plans and providing performance and capacity planning for HDS customers.
In 1990, Jaqui moved to Cambridge, MA, where she has specialized in meeting the challenges of large scale computing in the education industry. During this time Jaqui assisted numerous institutions of higher learning meet the explosive demand for information infrastructure in the '90s. Jaqui leveraged her extensive knowledge of performance and capacity planning into "open systems" and heterogeneous computing environments. At Boston College, BC, Jaqui was Manager of Systems Services responsible for the management of all systems services personnel, both academic and administrative.
When Jaqui started at BC, her main responsibility was the IBM mainframe running primarily standard administrative tasks under MVS. During her time at BC, Jaqui implemented a strategy that transformed the university from a mainframe dominated environment to a distributed and client-server environment. She designed and implemented numerous ground breaking technologies, ranging from Windows NT servers to IBM SP2 supercomputers. One of the most innovative, was the implementation of the largest Unix-based voice-mail system in the world serving over 16,000 individuals using an IBM SP supercomputer connected to the Internet and a Northern Telecom SL100 telephone switch.
During her time at BC, Jaqui and her staff were responsible for more than 80 systems running a wide variety of operating systems including OS/390, AIX, Windows NT, OSF/1 and VMS. In addition, Jaqui oversaw configured and managed "Marvin" - a robotic tape library system and supported a wide variety of applications including voice mail, email, x.500, Oracle and DB/2 databases, large scale data mining applications, SAS, IVR voice response unit applications, NetView, Remedy, web servers, network computers, IMSP and PeopleSoft.
Jaqui was also the computer security expert at BC, responsible for securing all central computer systems at the university and she was also the technical expert relied upon to investigate illegal online activity at the college.
In addition to her time at BC, Jaqui has assisted numerous other institutions of higher learning in the Greater Boston area including Boston University, Tufts University, Northeastern University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jaqui has been contracted to implement computer security measures including standard Unix operating system modifications and installing third party software for security including: AFS, ssh, WUFTP and BlackICE. Jaqui has also had numerous contracts to perform strategic planning, capacity planning, and performance tuning, including PeopleSoft capacity planning and performance tuning, and capacity planning for Solaris mail servers. Jaqui has also worked on smaller systems installing SUSE Linux, and the Apache web server.
Jaqui has also conducted a number of market studies for clients ranging from performance tools studies and DASD market comparisons, and has run custom training on a variety of topics.
Jaqui is listed in Strathmore's Who's Who. She has been an active participant of the Computer Measurement Group for 18 years. CMG is an independent user forum for performance and capacity planning professionals. Jaqui was a founding Board Member and Secretary of New Zealand CMG in 1987. Since coming to America, Jaqui was a founding Board Member of Greater Boston CMG, GBCMG, and was a driving force for including Unix and Windows NT topics at the CMG international conferences. Since 1993, Jaqui has been an active member of the CMG International Conference Committee, serving as Administrative Chair for CMG95 and CMG98 and General Chair for CMG99 and 2002. Jaqui has been elected to the CMG board of directors several times since 1995. In addition, Jaqui served as CIO and Webmistress for CMG from 1994-1999. In this role, Jaqui designed and implemented CMG's web presence at www.cmg.org. Jaqui also designed and wrote CMG's electronic paper submission process using Perl CGI programming. Jaqui is also the current President of CMG with a termthat startedin 2004 and ends in December 2005.
Jaqui was also the Chair and Webmistress of the Massachusetts Distributed Computing Environment Users Group from 1994 to 1997 and was a member of the IBM Executive Client/Server Forum in 1994 and 1995. Jaqui is also a member of the High Technology Crime Investigators Association and CUISP.
Jaqui has presented over 100 presentations in 8 countries on 4 continents. the topics range from mainframe disk access tuning, Unix performance tuning, distributed computing, Unix security, configuring servers for voice response and voice mail applications, web server performance and high performance web pages. See the publications section for more information.
Jaqui has a BS in Computer Information Systems from the State University of New York. Jaqui is a Certified IBM AIX Technical Expert (CATE) and a Certified IBM SP Specialist. She is currently completing a second Bachelors degree in Philosophy with a focus on ethics.
