Antony Steel is the founding director and the Chief Technology Officer at Belisama.

A research chemist by training, Antony Steel brings a unique experience and perspective with over 30 years of experience in the IT industry.  Before devoting himself full time to Belisama, Antony was involved as an end-user, administrator, developer and key technical adviser with an IBM business partner and then almost 20 years in IBM in a variety of roles with the most recent being a Senior Managing Consultant / Advanced Technical Support.  Antony's clients include end users, senior management and other key stakeholders in a range of industries, including some of the largest financial and business institutions and Government departments in Australia, New Zealand and the Asia Pacific region.

Antony's motto is that there is no singular approach to clients and he takes a special interest in innovating and designing technology solutions to assist his clients in achieving their objectives and needs. As a self-confessed geek who loves getting his hands dirty, Antony applies his solid technical depth and project management skills to troubleshoot and implement technical projects without losing sight of the "big picture" to deliver practical solutions for his clients.  As Antony also understands that technology concerns may be multi-layered, Antony is dedicated to working with his clients across all areas of the business to understand their true needs.  The strong commitment to collaborating with clients, together with his analytical approach and experience across various operating systems, server, storage and networking technologies together with his analytical approach means that he is often asked to resolve performance/stability issues in today's complex IT environments.

As an innovator, Antony played a pivotal role in creating a concept and design for a mixed Linux and AIX solution on IBM Power Servers.  As it had not yet been released to the market, his team needed to develop a bespoke solution for a key government department in Australia.  The challenge was to build and test the components in the IBM Lab and then rebuild and test in the customer's Data Centre. "It was a mixture of creative design, pre-sales and strong vision to convince the customer that the plan would work and meet their requirements, followed by building it while testing and tweaking to get it actually working" Antony said.

One of the challenges that Antony sees in today's commercial environment is that many of his clients have purchased high-end solutions without achieving the full value of their infrastructure.  Antony is driven in his role to solve the "more for less" challenge that every business faces and to practically utilise existing infrastructure to support their desired objectives.

As he is now based somwhere between Singapore and Sydney, Antony has been assisting clients in the region, from conducting performance and security audits for a major bank in Vietnam, (after which he was able to provide advice on how to improve the availability, performance and utilisation of their infrastructure) to assisting a new telecommunications provider to resolve security and performance issues with a large storage solution and assisting a number of clients harden their AIX SOE.