23 Apr Meet our Technical Consultancy Team
Academia is proud to introduce our Technical Consultancy team! Hailing from a variety of engineering backgrounds, the team are here to help you achieve your objectives through the use of technology… regardless of platform.
Whether it’s designing a solution to be implemented, providing consultancy workshops, onboarding or objective discovery, the Consultants team is here to help – and they especially love a challenge!
James Dancer – Technical Director
After beginning life at the Academia Group over 10 years ago as a Business Manager in the Media Team, James has gained a plethora of skills and expertise. Originally designing Media workflows (and having the joy of installing many Xsans), James then became Technical Manager and founded the engineering and support teams within the group. From there, he transitioned to Technical Director to lead the design and deployment of our Support, Datacenter and Hosting capabilities and our MDM and ISP offerings due to having a huge passion for anything technical.
James leads the Consultants team and is very much hands on – being instrumental in some of our largest and most complex deployments, as well as being the ultimate point of Technical Escalation within the business. His most enjoyed facet of consultancy is working with organisations to help them understand what they actually want to achieve as an end goal, and thinking outside the box to find ways to both achieve and augment the objectives through the use of the latest and greatest technology and methodologies.
Dave Prince – Lead Microsoft and Infrastructure Consultant
Dave has worked at the Academia Group for over 6 years, following 10+ years working in IT in the Education sector. Initially joining as a Solutions Engineer, Dave progressed to head up our Microsoft solutions team after demonstrating a huge amount of expertise across the board. As part of this, Dave was instrumental in crafting Academia’s broad range of offerings – primarily supporting our Managed Services customers.
As the team grew and the business took on more and more services customers, Dave’s role naturally grew to be more consultative – helping design on-premise, Cloud and Hybrid Cloud solutions for customers who we would ultimately end up supporting on their journey. As a result, there was a defined requirement for dedicated consultancy and Dave was certainly the man for the job!
Dave’s enthusiasm for the Microsoft stack is infectious – he’s in his element looking at how a Business, Charity, School, College or University can map its organisational objectives on to a suite of products and solutions that ultimately help drive productivity, modernise working, enhance security and increase user wellbeing.
Gary Collins – Lead Mobile Device Management Consultant
Gary has been with the Academia Group for more than 2 years, originally joining as a Senior Integration Engineer and – subsequently – a Jamf-qualified Integrator in the Mobile Device Management engineering team. During this time, Gary helped customers overcome the monolithic imaging era by onboarding new methods of deployment both Cloud-based and on-premise.
With Mobile Device Management becoming more and more prevalent, Gary found himself enjoying the problem-solving nature of this transition, as well as finding new and innovative ways to deploy the latest technology with the lowest technical impact. This has been demonstrated with the sheer amount of scripts in his personal library!
Gary’s passion is enabling organisations to both deploy and operate seamlessly from any location – he has extensive knowledge in Mobile Device Management in general, with a focus on:
- Jamf Pro (and now Jamf School)
- Apple Business Manager/Apple School Manager
- Device Enrolment to enable Zero-touch provisioning
- Microsoft services (such as Intune integration)
All of which can seamlessly tie any organisations entire estate – regardless of platform – together.
To access any of the great services we’ve highlighted, or to find out more about the incredible team we’re so proud to have, get in touch today.
