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Al Banks

@albanks

Infrastructure network architect at NTT DATA Business Solutions who deployed data center and disaster recovery environments for SAP customers.

United States

Message

At NTT DATA Business Solutions - US, I designed and deployed a production data center and a geographically separate disaster recovery site supporting 24×7 SAP operations for more than 100 customers. I also developed a Commvault cloud-connectivity solution that enabled retirement of the legacy robotic tape library.

I led a distributed network engineering team and worked directly with enterprise customers on data center migrations and connectivity across on-premises, AWS, and Azure environments. I introduced an infrastructure automation environment using Ansible, Python, and PostgreSQL to automate security enforcement and audit-compliant device backups.

Earlier, at Venture Technologies, I architected UCloud, a hosted unified communications service in a multi-tenant data center. I hold CCIE #6599 and an MBA, and my work spans enterprise network architecture, infrastructure operations, cybersecurity, and customer-facing solution design.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Vice President Board of Directors

Current

Crimson Place Condominiums

Apr 2022 - Present (4 years 7 months)

◦Led an ISP modernization project from vendor evaluation and negotiation through Board approval and implementation, delivering increased bandwidth at no additional cost to residents.
◦Provide governance, financial, and project oversight with the property management company, including annual budgeting, vendor decisions, insurance, and capital improvements.

Hosting & Infrastructure Network Architect and Lead

NTT DATA Business Solutions - US

Oct 2023 - Sep 2026 (2 years 11 months)

◦Led a distributed network engineering team of three across the U.S. and Malaysia, with responsibility for hiring, performance management, coaching, work prioritization, and team development. Introduced Agile practices to improve communication and accountability.
◦Led team restructuring and knowledge transfer during organizational change, transitioning legacy responsibilities to a new internation

Senior UCC Engineer

AVI-SPL

Jul 2019 - Oct 2023 (4 years 3 months)

◦Supported three Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) clusters serving 30,000 phone sets and geographically dispersed telco providers.
◦Collaborated with customer engineering teams and international telecommunications providers in China, Vietnam, Japan, Brazil, and Germany to migrate legacy voice circuits to Cisco voice gateways.
◦Integrated Cisco UC with Orange VoIP provider and Genesys cl

Senior Data Network Administrator Cloud Services / Network Engineer III

C Spire

Jul 2015 - Jul 2019 (4 years)

◦Served as a presales technical resource for the sales team — leading customer discovery calls, solution design, and technical scoping, and translating business requirements into technical solutions.
◦Designed enterprise network access control solutions (Cisco ISE, 802.1x, DMVPN) and architected Fortinet firewall solutions for the enterprise data center environment.
◦Supported operations of corpor

Senior Unified Network Engineer

Venture Technologies

Mar 2006 - Jul 2015 (9 years 4 months)

◦ Regularly partnered with sales staff in customer engagements, developing solution architectures, PoCs, BoMs, technical proposals, and RFP/E-Rate responses while presenting solutions to customer leadership teams.
◦ Served as technical lead during customer discovery sessions, whiteboarding engagements, and architecture design discussions to develop enterprise networking and collaboration solutions

VP of Emerging Technologies / Senior WAN Analyst

Business Communications, Inc.

Sep 2001 - Mar 2006 (4 years 6 months)

◦Customer voice and data pre-sales customer engagements and solution design.
◦Customer presentation and implementation of accepted solutions.
◦Product evaluation for voice and network products.

Network Engineer

SkyTel

Oct 2000 - Oct 2001 (1 year)

◦Research and procedure development for network deployments.
◦High-level maintenance and support of production network systems.

Network Administrator

Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company

Jan 1998 - Jan 2000 (2 years)

◦LAN and WAN support, including migration of the entire office from Token Ring to Ethernet.
◦Migrated entire office from Token Ring to Ethernet
◦Used STUN (Serial Tunneling) to eliminate a WAN circuit.
◦Participated in offsite DR exercises

Network Administrator

TEC - Telephone Electronics Corporation

Jan 1997 - Jan 1998 (1 year)

◦Network administration, including Microsoft Exchange
◦Deployment of enterprise accounting package (Great Plains and FRx)
◦Designed and deployed WAN connectivity to remote offices
◦Designed and deployed SpartaCom SAPS to share modems for remote dial-in needs