Proprietor - Chris Ray

Chris has been involved in the IT industry for over 40 years.  He joined the Post Office Telephones after school and spent the next 12 years with them working on transmission systems, electronics and some of the earliest data modems manufactured (a 300bps modem was larger than a briefcase). He also gained various City and Guilds qualifications, both Ordinary and Higher National Certificates in Engineering, and finally a B.Sc in Electronics and Telecomms. This photo was taken in the Midlands Electronic Service Centre where Chris worked for the last two years he was at the Post Office.

From there Chris spent two years helping to introduce Microprocessor based weighing machines at Salter Industrial Measurement (better known for bathroom and kitchen scales) . With that experience he moved to a small manufacturer of data modems for two years as Technical Manager.

 

In 1981 Chris joined the Computing and Telecomms Group of ICI, where he spent the next 20 years.  Meanwhile ICI itself  restructured a few times, de-merged into Zeneca, sold-off its non-Pharmaceutical businesses, and finally merged with the Swedish company Astra to form the current AstraZeneca; each shift bringing its own crisis to the corporate IT structures.  Chris and a colleague developed and introduced the first packet switching network into ICI: it used X.25 technology.  He then went on  to develop and Introduce an X400 network that integrated all the company's diverse email systems for the first time, and later took a lead technical role in the replacement of all these systems with a single corporation-wide Microsoft Exchange implementation, having worked with Microsoft on the beta testing of their Exchange product.   In parallel with this he designed developed and implemented a global corporate SMTP firewall system that checked all incoming email for viruses, supplied an email switching system for all the company UNIX systems, and provided secure encrypted connections (using TLS) to many external companies that AstraZeneca did  business with.  He also helped nurse all these systems through the "millennium crisis" and was one of a select group of people paid a special bonus if they agreed to stay with the company until 1/1/2000.

A month after the Millennium crisis was successfully handled AstraZeneca management sold the entire Computing and Telecoms department to IBM.

A part of the outsource deal with IBM Chris found himself working in the IT Architects group where his time was sold back to AstraZeneca at far more than they used to pay him.  Five years later Chris accepted an Early  Retirement package from IBM. 

 

Bazaar Systems was started in October 2005.