John Burke is the founder of Burke Consulting and Technology Solutions, specializing in system management, IT consulting and outsourcing. Mr. Burke has over 25 years experience in all aspects of IT and IT management, including systems, operations and development. He is co-Chair of SIGMPE, vice-Chair of the MPE Forum, a frequent presenter at HP3000-related conferences and has been writing regularly for publication about HP3000 issues for over twelve years.

From 1997 through 2002, Mr. Burke was Systems and Operations Manager for Pacific Coast Building Products (PCBP), a $700 million/year manufacturer and distributor of building products. He had overall responsibility for 4 HP3000s (700+ users on the production system), 80+ Wintel servers, System Administration (4 NT Administrators), Help Desk Support (4 client support representatives), Desktop Support (4 technicians). Mr. Burke planned and supervised the implementation of significant infrastructure growth to support PCBP’s move from in-house developed HP 3000-based systems to SAP R/3 using Oracle on Wintel servers. Apache/iX and Samba/iX played a major role in PCBP’s migration to SAP R/3. The Samba/iX interface to the Wintel servers was used in daily production from mid-1998 through 2002, moving mission-critical data back and forth between systems. Apache/iX was used to create a documentation server for the IT department.

In 2000, Mr. Burke planned and coordinated the remodeling of a backup data center and the subsequent move of the existing corporate data center across town to this newly remodeled site. Just before leaving PCBP, Mr. Burke prepared the plan for upgrading the company’s WinNT network to Windows 2000 and Active Directory.

During his time at PCBP, Mr. Burke dramatically reduced both planned and unplanned downtime and significantly improved backup reliability. This resulted in a dramatic improvement in overall system reliability, availability and performance.

From mid-1998 through the first quarter of 2000, without taking away from his responsibilities to PCBP, Mr. Burke remotely managed the HP 3000 systems and maintained the application suite for Construction Computer Center, 3000 miles away in Pennsylvania. Only two on-site visits were made during the entire almost two year engagement. This helps prove Mr. Burke’s assertion that Outsourced System Management is a way for small to mid-sized companies to economically obtain expert-level system administration.

Since 1995, Mr. Burke has been a regular monthly contributor to The 3000 NewsWire. His “Hidden Value” and “net.digest” columns, beginning with June 2000 as well as the “Best of” compendium of columns prior to June 2000 appear in searchable form at www.burke-consulting.com. From 1990 until joining The 3000 NewsWire, Mr. Burke appeared regularly in HP Professional magazine.

Mr. Burke spent almost nine years as IS Manager for a provider of payroll and accounting services targeted at the construction industry. He completely revamped its aging user-hostile software portfolio, and spearheaded the company’s entry into the turnkey market. Mr. Burke spent nine years as Director of MIS for a mid-sized manufacturer of colorants and coatings used by the pharmaceutical, food and confectionery industries. He rescued a computerization project that was eating up resources and showing no return and later in his tenure designed and implemented a new generation of MRP II software that help improve inventory turns and reduce waste. Mr. Burke spent four years as IS Manager for an Environmental Engineering firm consolidating all computer processing on an in-house system and designed and implemented a sewer and water allocation management system that was still in use, essentially unchanged, 15 years later.

Mr. Burke has a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Michigan. He also has an M.A. in Mathematics from the University of Colorado and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado. Mr. Burke holds CDP certification (#791576) and is HP Certified in MPE/iX System Administration (3HO-001) While obtaining his M.A. in Mathematics, Mr. Burke taught college mathematics up to and including Calculus I & II. While studying for his M.S. in Computer Science, Mr. Burke worked for IBM in the Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) department at its tape drive/system facility just outside Boulder, Colorado developing failure prediction models.