Friends and Colleagues,
After a 40-year career in information technology, I’m retiring and turning my attention full-time to activities, my family, crafts and community support - that played only a background role over a long career. I am grateful to have witnessed and participated in such amazing advances in technology over this period, sharing this experience with so many incredible and influential colleagues, clients and IT innovators.
After being convinced on a whim by a good friend in the early 80s to pursue a degree in computer science, and not the psych degree from an idealist with no real firm idea what to do with his life….along with a growing family of two (and soon to be three), I dove into a discipline I really knew nothing about that was literally in its formative years as an accessible technology for businesses.
Supporting a family and working full-time was a necessity while going to school, so my career in IT really began with COBOL development in an IBM MVS/CICS environment, which led to the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX/VMS environment, where I soon became competent enough in programming and systems management. This experience enabled me to eventually take that new computer science degree and parlay it into the real start of my IT career.
Working in a technical services role for an apparel manufacturer, I became an expert in all things DEC VAX/VMS (those in the know understand this was an affordable and an incredibly versatile platform for medium sized businesses), where I participated in rearchitecting and enhancing the performance of their Manufacturing Resource Planning platform, supporting data center operations, developing an early form of email, provide systems management of the DEC environment. Working for a manufacturer, I was often at the plants implementing new automation solutions and linking to the DEC VAX and laying the early foundations of data communication with multiplexers.
With this experience in hand, I got what I considered at the time, the dream job in 1990: a Network Systems and Analyst role at the renowned engineering company CH2M Hill. This was the very early days of networking and TCP/IP and the internet was really only ‘a thing’ with academic and government science institutions. But CH2M Hill was an innovator, and one of my first jobs was to begin implementing TCP/IP and supporting the very early form of Ethernet switches company wide. This led to a cascade of networking related technology, including email, Netware for file servers, Windows NT server (and Windows Desktop), wide-area networking moving from “bridges” to routers and soon architecting the first implementation of frame relay in Colorado. Of course, in the middle of all this, the internet was becoming more accessible for private enterprise and World Wide Web application was soon released by CERN, so from our 9.6bps connection to the internet, we put up our first web home page. A Master of Science degree in Telecommunications and Networking from the University of Denver improved my skills, provided a richer enterprise and global perspective and gave me the boost and confidence I needed to innovate and lead in this discipline.
In 1997 I took the leap into IT consulting. The internet was changing everything, and web development and internetworking was the focus of enterprises worldwide. This was a great time to consult, applying the experience I gained working in IT for the enterprise. Consulting projects ranged from a broad spectrum of infrastructure and enablement technologies, to wide-networking, disaster recovery and business continuity planning, network architecture development, application architecture support, IT service management development, service desk development and telecommunications. The dotcom boom was in full swing and new businesses were formed with the internet and web as the new enabler. Which of course led to the dotcom bust in 2001 and many of the consulting companies supporting this development frenzy also went bust.
In 2002, it was time for something new, because the consulting role I was accustomed to was no longer sustainable, with enterprises more reluctant to pay top dollar to consultants in this post dotcom recovery. That something new was telecommunications optimization, looking to save companies money by optimizing the telecom spend, looking for opportunities to reduce needless and redundant products and services, conducting configuration optimization, and negotiating all the various and varied related agreements. These were all areas, as it turns out, that were given very little attention by most organizations due to the complexity and arcane nature of the products and billing, so there were lots of opportunities for cost savings.
Working with my partner from my last consulting gig, we worked together to form Ingenuity, Inc. with a foundation of telecommunications optimization services. This soon evolved to all things infrastructure and related enablement technologies, where over six years we supported large and small organizations, both domestic and international, in cost savings efforts and assisted in emerging information technologies—crafting solutions for disaster recovery, enterprise architecture, and contact center technologies while trying to foster a culture of innovation with each client. It tested my resilience and creativity, reinforcing my belief that great teams can achieve anything.
Then, in 2008, I joined NET(net), Inc. as Senior Vice President of Value Creation, a role I held with enthusiasm for nearly 17 years until May 2025. At NET(net), I found my true calling: empowering organizations worldwide to maximize their IT investments. From negotiating telecommunications contracts to optimizing cloud services, assisting with cybersecurity initiatives, supporting SD-WAN enablement and managed services and IT outsourcing - I helped clients save billions while driving measurable ROI. My work included data center and networking technologies and the migration to cloud, all things hardware, broad and varied IT security initiatives, collaboration technologies and vendor selections, always with a focus on delivering value through trust and the attention to detail.
What I cherish most are the relationships built along the way. Leading teams, mentoring emerging leaders, and partnering with clients across North America and abroad taught me that success is rooted in collaboration and good communication.
I owe immense debt to those who’ve walked this path with me. To my NET(net) family: your brilliance and dedication fueled my drive daily, and our shared impact will endure. To my colleagues from Baley, CH2M HILL, Claremont, Emerald, and Ingenuity: thank you for challenging me, trusting me, and making every moment rewarding. To my clients: your partnership inspired me to push harder and think bigger. And to my family, and most importantly my wife and partner of 45 years, your love and support made it all possible.
Retirement is just a word and does not begin to describe what I have in store for the future, and it is not golf. We have a “farm” to develop, with a new cut-flower business to get off the ground, gardening, home projects to complete, wood working and workshop to advance, local community involvement, more time with grandchildren and travel near and far from our home here in beautiful Western Colorado. Like they say, don’t stop until you drop, and that definitely describes what my wife and I have in store for our future.
I have a lot of cherished memories, and I have worked with so many amazing people, so with an open heart and a tremendous amount of gratitude, I bid fair well to the daily grind of working full-time!
- Dave