The technologythatcannot go down.
More than 25 years running 24/7 mission-critical infrastructure for a cruise line, an airline, and a healthcare claims platform serving more than 150M covered lives. Most recently VP, IT Infrastructure and Operations at Royal Caribbean Group, holding a ~$400M budget across more than 60 ships.
Downtime is never an IT metric.
It is a ground stop.
At Delta, any outage over 45 minutes forced a full ground stop. At Royal Caribbean, the data centers sail with the guests, two to three per ship, segmented by fire zone. At TriZetto, every claim for more than 150M covered lives ran under audit. In places like these, infrastructure is judged by what keeps moving when something breaks, and by what the business stops paying for when nothing does.
Four environments. Four ways to fail.
Pick an environment to see the estate, what an outage would have meant, and what I built to keep it running.
A fleet of floating data centers.
Ship systems run hotel operations, point of sale, wayfinding, casino, and CCTV for guests and crew, far from shoreside support. The July 2024 CrowdStrike outage put that entire estate in scope for restoration.
- Led incident command through the CrowdStrike outage; the fleet was restored and remediated within 48 hours.
- Designed 2 to 3 data centers per vessel, segmented by fire zone for failover and fault isolation.
- Delivered near-gigabit bandwidth at sea over redundant multi-provider LEO links. Starlink is still the fleet's primary link.
300 airports on one portfolio.
Delta.com, the Fly Delta app, loyalty, reservations, and airport systems served 180M customers a year. Any outage over 45 minutes forced a full ground stop.
- Took the 5-year AWS program to 75% complete on schedule, deciding the fate of more than 1,000 applications. Delta still runs on it.
- Led 2 Directors and 4 General Managers across 125K mobile devices, 65K desktops, 20K servers, and 30K mainframe MIPS.
- Built a cybersecurity program meeting aviation, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOX rules, with CyberArk privileged access.
Claims for 150M covered lives, under continuous audit.
TriZetto hosted claims adjudication for more than 100 health insurers. Every one of the 107 hosted customers audited the platform, on top of external HIPAA, HITRUST, and SOC auditors.
- Passed 100% of more than 100 external HIPAA, HITRUST, and SOC audits.
- Cut deployment cycles from 6-8 weeks to 1 week with a greenfield PHI hosting rebuild and automated deployment.
- Freed $15M in OpEx over 3 years by upskilling offshore engineers from Tier 1 to Tier 3.
Expedia.com, from two nines to three.
At 99.0% availability, a site can be down 87.6 hours a year. At 99.9%, the allowance falls below 9 hours. On a booking site, every one of those hours is lost bookings.
- Raised Expedia.com live-site availability from 99.0% to 99.9% year over year.
- Built the next-generation data center, reporting to the CIO/CTO, on time and under budget, plus a $30M disaster recovery site in Phoenix.
- Cut the service request lifecycle from 55 days to 7 within 6 months using Six Sigma.
Built in operations. Accountable for the budget.
My career started close to the hardware. At Vicom Systems, a venture-backed storage startup, I ran telecom, networks, and systems and helped engineer the data migration platform behind US Patent 7,337,197. At Siemens, I ran more than 9,400 servers across 3 data centers, then held P&L for a Fortune 500 financial services account with $45M in OpEx and more than 400 staff.
Expedia recruited me to build its next-generation data center, then handed me global infrastructure: 3 data centers, 17K servers, and more than 100 staff. At TriZetto, a PE-owned healthcare claims platform, I owned architecture and hosting for more than 150M covered lives and sat on the 12-person deal team for the $2.7B sale to Cognizant.
Delta Air Lines and Royal Caribbean Group were the largest mandates: ~$400M budgets at each, more than 800 IT staff at Delta, more than 60 ships at Royal Caribbean. The cost-governance programs I built at TriZetto, Delta, and Royal Caribbean are still running today.
Since 2025, I have advised founders, CEOs, and boards as a fractional CIO, CTO, and CISO through CTRL ALT Elite. Next, I want to bring that operating discipline back inside one company as VP of Infrastructure and Operations, VP of IT, or CIO.
Three mandates. Three results that held.
Restored the fleet in 48 hours, then cut the cloud bill.
Reporting to the SVP and CIO, I led more than 150 staff and held a ~$400M budget within 1% variance across more than 60 ships, 5 private destinations, and call centers. Through the July 2024 CrowdStrike outage, I ran incident command until the fleet was restored and remediated, within 48 hours. FinOps governance across 5 cloud providers carrying ~$30M a year removed ~$6M a year in waste inside 3 months. Automating ~80% of developer provisioning added lifecycle controls that auto-destroy resources.
Moved an airline toward AWS without missing a milestone.
Owned a portfolio of more than 800 IT staff and a $400M budget ($300M OpEx, $100M CapEx) across 300 airports. Took the 5-year AWS program to 75% complete on schedule, deciding the fate of more than 1,000 applications, and Delta still runs on that environment. Vendor negotiations avoided $100M in costs over five years, validated by Delta Finance, and modernizing apps for PaaS on AWS while moving teams from Waterfall to Agile cut development cycles 40%.
Rebuilt PHI hosting, then sat on the deal team.
Owned IT strategy and operations for claims hosting serving more than 100 health insurers, with P&L for more than 100 hosted customers and a 700+ person delivery organization on $80M+ OpEx and $25M+ CapEx. A greenfield PHI hosting rebuild with automated deployment cut deployment cycles from 6-8 weeks to 1 week. Every one of more than 100 external HIPAA, HITRUST, and SOC audits passed. For the $2.7B sale, I sat on the 12-person deal team with the PE partners, then served on Cognizant's integration team.
Four habits from four mission-critical estates.
Each one traces back to a specific mandate on this page, in the order they matter: before, during, and after the money and the outages.
Know what stops the business before spending a dollar.
Before moving money or workloads, the first question is which systems halt revenue and how fast each one has to come back. At Delta that answer was blunt: 45 minutes, then a ground stop. At Royal Caribbean it became a Business Impact Analysis mapping application criticality and recovery posture across ship and shore.
Build cost governance that outlasts its builder.
Savings that depend on one person watching the bill disappear when that person leaves. So the controls go into the platform: FinOps across every provider, provisioning guardrails, and lifecycle rules that auto-destroy resources instead of waiting for someone to notice them.
Replace what cannot be patched.
Some estates cannot be tuned into shape. At TriZetto, I won sponsor funding for a greenfield PHI hosting rebuild rather than keep patching the old one. At Expedia, the answer was a new data center and a $30M disaster recovery site. At Delta, every one of more than 1,000 applications got a deliberate decision: move, rewrite, or sunset.
When it breaks anyway, run one command.
No estate is outage-proof. In July 2024, the CrowdStrike update took down systems around the world, and I led incident command for Royal Caribbean Group until the fleet was restored and remediated. The groundwork came earlier: merging 2 siloed IT teams and unifying ticketing across maritime and land operations put ship and shore in one queue.
25 years of infrastructure and operations.
Certifications, recognition, and education.
- FinOps Certified PractitionerFINOPS FOUNDATION, 2026
- ITIL Foundation
- Six Sigma Green Belt
- C|CISO v4 coursework completedEC-COUNCIL, 2026
- Siemens Managed Services Leadership Award for Quality and Continuous ImprovementFY 2008
- US Patent 7,337,197VICOM DATA MIGRATION PLATFORM, WITH IBM
- Three published whitepapers on infrastructure and AI riskCTRL ALT ELITE