Alien (The CEO)

Alien is the nickname given to Allen by his well respected peer, and friend, after signing a formal report with Alien Miller.  Given the love of astronomy, space, science, and the quest for radio astronomy activates, the name stuck, and the future was set in stone with the formation of Alien Inn (the small business), then growing to a fully fledged company with its eyes on the skies – Alien Inn Pty Ltd (The Information Systems focused arm of the company); Research @ Alien Inn Space (The Research & Development arm of the company); and RAG Salvage Australia (The decommissioning services of Information Systems technology arm of the company).

Allen is able to provide input on architecture artifacts in line with understanding of the actual Defence environment and enterprise architecture status – inclusive of knowledge of the terrestrial communications networks as well as deployed networks and satellite communications.

Allen’s roles have included design and delivery of geospatial server architectures, as well as deploying desktop applications, including the delivery of geospatial web map services for Defence/ADF.  He has worked closely with Industry, including ESRI, to architect the best practise server technology to fit within Defence environment, taking considerations of the environment security, identifying management frameworks, and principles of services oriented architectures. Allen was responsible for design assurance on geospatial systems within component projects in the commercial, government, and Defence environments for Rapid Environmental Assessments (REA), a system fondly called REANet. Allen worked directly to the Program Manager in the delivery of REANet, and developed excellent relationships with Executive and Directors in carrying out tasking for day to day operations of the program.

REANet is a geospatial capability system which was designed, built, and deployed by Allen in 2008 in conjunction with its sister capability WebREP by ESRI Australia, with the system still in use in Defence at 2020 as an evolutionary capability which still meets the needs of the Joint Forces on the Security Endorsed environment. REANet is a capability that took single gigabyte geospatial dataset processing from 48 hours, with failures, to sub two minutes and no failures, including a mass data processing effort of multiple datasets of high terabytes in volume taking a blistering 6 hours, no failures.

Allen has worked in team environments for all projects done to date, and have worked harmoniously in terms of providing mentorship or advice on geospatial architectural matters. This included teams across systems integrators, commercial industry, APS or DSTG as well as academia and the Commonwealth government.  Allen has worked with a number of agencies and sites in Defence to deliver geospatial plans for architecture across multiple sites, working with team and providing guidance on the design, implementation and delivery.

Allen is experienced with cloud architectures and able to translate infrastructure and architectural direction in line with requirements.

Well versed with over 20+ years’ experience in design and implementation of hardware and software deployments, experience with designing geospatial software systems for organisations including Defence through Common Off The Shelf (COTS) and Open Source products as required. Allen has an in-depth experience with setting up of infrastructure for geospatial capability delivery, with knowledge on best practise for clustering, failover, redundancy management, services oriented architectures and deployed systems. This experience covers the corporate Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) of operating systems such as IBM’s AIX5L UNIX servers through to Microsoft’s Windows 10 Enterprise desktop and Microsoft Server 2019 capabilities to provide advice and guidance on set up of infrastructure and architecture to maximise outcomes and efficiency in collection, processing, storage and dissemination in context of the limitations and capabilities of Defences SIE.

Allen is well versed in developing infrastructure and architecture for GIS, and has held several positions where have been required to work closely and consult with varied stakeholders across industry and government, producing documentation to ensure the project meets Security, Architecture and EIM obligations, progressed designs and implementation towards Security Accreditation and EIM governance processes, in particular for geospatial projects.

Allen has developed: an understanding of geospatial standards, OGC policies and interoperability frameworks to work with geospatial data in the enterprise; an understanding of Defence’s EIM obligations and governance policies; and has experience with designing systems which require unique attention to the management of geospatial data to produce high performance including AI, data cubing and modelling.

The Future

Research @ Alien Inn Space is the Research and Development arm of the company. Keep an eye on this one. Allen’s PHD in Philosophy – Research project is right at the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence and the education of the next generation of System Administrators. 

The Core Information Systems practices of Alien Inn Pty Ltd.

The Rugged series of Information Systems.

Allen’s forensic methods to produce results in systems delivery prompted a deliberate focus on: Research and Development; Customer’s product analysis; Cyber Security; ICT in Space; ………………..