3point ➝ Seequent ➝ ??

Over the last three years, I have helped set the strategic direction and execution of the cloud strategy at Seequent. In 2016, as the CTO of 3point Science, I co-founded 3point Science in 2013 and sold to Seequent in 2016, where the company continued to operate as a subsidiary of Seequent (at that time called ARANZ Geo). ARANZ Geo rebranded to Seequent in 2017 I was involved in everything from project management, design, development, integration, management and strategy - we built out Steno3D.com, which was focused on scientific visualization and collaboration. We focused on product-market fit, iteration and speed to market, getting to a product launch in five months with a six person team. The tool was used by the UN for communicating water resources at a refugee camp, in a NOVA documentary, and in open source and many other projects. Micro-seismic events in Steno3D As we grew the team to take over many of the functions I was filling, we integrated further with Seequent's desktop modeling products to allow Leapfrog3D to seamlessly transfer geologic models to our cloud-based visualization and collaboration tools. The successful integration led the company to restructure 3point Science as the cloud division within Seequent in 2017, and I became the Director of Cloud Architecture. I looked after a 12 person team focused on our native-cloud product (lfview.com) as we grew it out of the technology and learnings from Steno3D and applied it to the more conservative mining industry. This required improved functionality, reliability and visualization performance. I led the technical team as well as focused on securing funding from government programs and large accelerated development contracts with existing industry clients; I led these conversations, developed relationships, pitched and won industry contracts as well as government funding that aligned to the roadmap of our cloud visualization and collaboration product. We were awarded a large contract in 2018 and the development team I was leading doubled in size in a month with developers from both New Zealand and Calgary. In retrospect, doubling a team in such a short time is not good for short-term productivity as everyone is focused on teaching the new team members! As a distributed team we tackled and delivered on the accelerated development project goals successfully as well as continued to integrate the development teams, architecture, practices, code, and culture across all of Seequent.

In 2019, I transitioned from the Director of Cloud Architecture to the VP of Cloud Architecture. The increase in responsibility saw me looking after the direction and vision of our existing enterprise/hosted products that were built in a hosted server architecture that did not take advantage of cloud services (storage, networking, etc.) as well as the cloud provider strategy for all of Seequent. This strategy included choice of cloud providers and services, API infrastructure, domain strategy, authorization, and many other architecture choices The teams that I directed consisted of 65 people that were distributed in five timezones (Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, and New Zealand).

During my tenure at Seequent, I oversaw the transition towards a cloud native and augmented approach of our desktop and enterprise products, introduced a company wide API infrastructure, consolidated our strategy and approach for multiple projects, directed partner integrations, led standards groups internally and externally (including OMF), and ran architectural design sprints that were global, collaborative, cross-disciplinary and continue to set the technical direction for Seequent. Many of the important changes that I helped to facilitate were cultural; shifting the entire company (including influencing the design, HR, sales, marketing and research teams) towards scaled agile practices, knowledge management, documentation, specification (APIs), componentization, test-driven development, continuous integration, continuous deployment and delivery of our products and services.

It is a difficult to transition any desktop only application to cloud native infrastructure. One example includes changing the delivery pipeline from one that is released every 4-6 months as a static executable with no on-demand operational support -- to one that can release software on demand to a highly-available, cloud native infrastructure; that is hard, especially if development is continuing at the same time! By the time I left, our quality-assurance team was able to release software with a GUI-based deployment process to a Kubernetes cluster, on demand, without customer downtime. From commit to production could be completed safely using our continuous integration and deployment system in less than 30 minutes. This allowed us to generally recover from unexpected errors/down-time within an hour.

I created over a thousand pages of documentation, architecture diagrams, meeting notes, strategy documents, and presentations. I was often traveling every month and my calendar chased the time-zones trying to get as much overlap with the various global offices and customers as possible. It was intense. I learned an immense amount on in-person and remote management, influence and inspiration in a fast growing company. Seequent grew went from 86 after 3point Science was acquired to over 400 in the three years I was there. I am very proud of the teams that I built and the work we accomplished as well as the cultural practices that I helped integrate into Seequent.

I am excited to see what the teams at Seequent do next. 🚀