Meet Mark.

We recently caught up with Mark, our Head of IT & Infrastructure, to hear more about his role and to learn about his overall experiences within the travel industry.

By Hannah Worthing4th December 2020

Tell us about your role within Inspiretec?

I’m the Group IT & Infrastructure Manager, which mostly means I’m responsible for everything IT related. I oversee the running of our hosted environments in NGD and public cloud as well as our internal server, desktop and server infrastructure. My team are involved in every project and provide a service to every team and person within the business. Our primary focus is on the service to our paying customers and the performance and stability of Inspiretec software and infrastructure within hosting.

What would you say were your main areas of interest and expertise?

My main area of expertise is fault finding, which also happens to be what I find most enjoyable. Taking what can be millions of requests from a customer per day and finding the one that’s causing us issues. This stems from my background of electronic engineering before I got into professional IT 25 years ago.

How did you get into the Industry?

I have been an IT professional for 25 years and have worked within the travel industry since joining Inspiretec 13 years ago. Computing is something I’ve been interested in since 1976 - yes, I was 5 years old! At the age of 14 I wrote my own operating system for a school project, before anyone had even heard of Bill Gates!! However, I decided to join the Royal Navy to travel - who knew they’d send me to the Persian Gulf for the 1991 war - not what I call a holiday! After leaving the Royal Navy, where I’d served as a Weapons Engineer, focussing on electronic engineering, I decided to look at IT as a career. It was obviously a fast growing thing - the internet was just about starting out and I wanted to be part of that.

What is it that you like about working in the travel industry?

As this is my only job in Travel, I can only answer what I enjoy about working at Inspiretec. The answer is a simple one - the dynamic environment in a business our size allows anyone to get involved and to make a difference - not just to what they’re doing but to the entire business. This is not something I’ve seen in my previous IT roles. One day we can be spec'ing up half a million pound spend on hosting kit, the next we can be migrating a customer to our hosting platform.

What would be your perfect holiday?

Definitely not the Persian Gulf in 1991! My perfect holiday would be somewhere as far from electronics, computing and the modern world as I can get!

What does the future hold for the travel industry and what part has Inspiretec got to play in it?

This year has obviously been a tough year for everyone, world over. I do believe however that the industry has exciting opportunities to leverage technology to get them ahead for the future. Plus the entire planet needs a holiday after this year!

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