Sirius Appoints New Services Manager for 24/7 Operations

Sirius, the Open Source services specialist, has appointed Antony Stone to manage their managed services business. Over the past three years Sirius has developed its business from consultancy and systems integration into managed services, support and outsourcing. This move mirrors increasing customer sophistication, and the shift in emphasis from how Open Source is acquired, to how it is supported and maintained. Sirius' proposition is to provide the ongoing expertise to ensure not only that Open Source is integrated with the rest of the technology mix in the business, but that it also 'just works'. Sirius scaled up their support operations to continuous 24/7 monitoring and managed services from the 1st February this year for a single award-winning managed service customer, then made the round-the-clock service publicly available from the beginning of August. The appointment of Antony Stone as the new Head of Services and Support strengthens the operations still further and brings strong Open Source, Security and Technical competence to the team. Antony is a networking and security systems engineer with 18 years' experience working with Linux and Open source software. He has been Technical Director in Open Source startups and the recipient of DTI SMART awards for innovation. He holds a Master's degree in Information Security from Royal Holloway, University of London, and teaches on the MSc security course as a visiting lecturer. He has published articles in Open Source magazines in both English and German, and regularly gives presentations at international conferences. Antony joins the Sirius management team, which also includes Chief Executive Mark Taylor, recently appointed by the Cabinet Office to lead their 'New Suppliers to Government' working group. Speaking of the appointment, Mark Taylor said: “Antony Stone is extremely well respected in the Open Source technical community and brings impeccable technical credentials to Sirius. We are delighted that he has chosen to join us at this exciting time in our development.”