About Us

The formation of Lightnet was inspired by the observation that, even in the largest IT projects success depends on relatively few exceptional engineers.  The founders of LightNet have seen this occur over many years of involvement at the sharp end of major IT projects of all kinds. The attributes of these critical team members are derived from a mixture of personality, and talent which cannot easily be determined from a CV, but becomes evident when exposed to sufficiently demanding situations.  We have also noted that the effectiveness of experts is considerably enhanced by an atmosphere of cooperation and proactive exchange of knowledge. The Lightnet philosophy is to build an organisation of such key people, in all cases identified by personal experience.

Most of our people are software engineers, but we also have project managers, all of whom have a background of hands on development themselves. We strive to establish a culture of mutual assistance and information sharing, an approach that increases the reach of each individual and speeds their personal growth. The value of the resulting mutual respect and good morale when added to the motivation of challenging assignments is a key factor in our success.

LightNet combines this philosophy with many years hands on experience in high availability, secure, scalable computing environments. Utilizing our strong background in system level engineering and expert Microsoft scripting skills, we specialise in fully automated, deployment and management of operating environments.

Principals

Marcus Bateson, Chief Technologist

As a respected MCSE with more than ten years hands on experience, Marcus is in constant demand as a leading engineer on business critical Microsoft infrastructure projects. He is an expert on all aspects of design and implementation of high availability server systems encompassing networks, platforms, databases and SAN configurations.

His initial years with ICL Retail systems exposed him to the demanding requirements of non-stop trading environments, and the challenge of using Microsoft technologies to address them. This was followed by a variety of major projects for Retail, Financial Services, and Telecoms customers, typically as the technical authority, which added breadth and depth to his knowledge.

Projects where Marcus has played a leading role include migration of the store infrastructure for Marks and Spencer, creation of a high availability database system for Harrods, and managing the client/server infrastructure for Orange . More recently responsibilities include the design and delivery of a resilient billing system platform for NTL.

John Mullerworth, Senior Project Manager

With more than 30 years of software and systems development experience, mostly at the leading edge of the IT industry, John is able to reduce the risks associated with selection and deployment of the complex new technologies required for large scale business systems. In addition to technical strategy and system design skills, he brings considerable experience of managing high profile software development and system implementation projects with a record of reliable delivery.

With an early background as an operating system and middleware programmer providing a solid technical foundation, John moved on to consultancy and implementation projects in Europe and the UK . Recent experience includes a number of years as a director of solution delivery services for Fujitsu in California .

Major projects range from development work for the European Space Agency’s first weather satellite ground computer system to overall responsibility for the delivery of the Safeway (US) Club Card system, the largest on-line customer loyalty operation of its time.