Delton Phillips — putting people first
FRESH from sixth form, Delton Phillips joined Patni Computers Systems for training as an associate software engineer. It was an experience pivotal to his career today, as he spent six months writing precompilers COBOL, Sybase, SQL Anywhere and Reverse Engineering at the company’s office in Kingston.
Today, Phillips credits that training in programming as the foundation for his growth as he assumed the position of director of strategy and innovation at Particular Presence, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) consulting partner specialising in AWS Lambda (serverless computing). As the major cloud computing platform that powers companies such as NetFlix and DropBox, AWS essentially vets its solutions and supports its teams in executing workloads on the platform for quality assurance.
As director of strategy and innovation, Phillips has responsibility for setting the overall strategy for the company by liaising with the human resource, recruitment, learning & development partners (customers and vendors), as well as the technology and sales departments to maintain the company’s reputation as being the only “home-grown” AWS consulting partner in Jamaica. That designation also allows Particular Presence to deliver maximum value to their partners.
Phillips is proud that, to date, all the team members are trained and certified Jamaican professionals whose competence drive robust solutions, a critical aspect of developing the company’s human capital. The company hired a full-time learning and development officer during the pandemic to further train and develop their team members to engage in more complex opportunities such as cloud migration, re-architecting solutions to leverage the cloud, and developing strategies to accelerate innovation.
Phillips observed that the COVID-19 pandemic was an opportune period for their customers, particularly those who invested in digitisation, and aligned with their company’s vision. One such example was British Caribbean Insurance, which leveraged technology to make the experience more seamless for their customers, resulting in a positive return on investment (ROI). “A certified solutions architect is one equipped with the depth of knowledge about the tools, technologies and processes suitable for a customer’s needs. It also allows us to identify opportunities such as cloud, on-premise or hybrid solutions, which is underscored by having a solid understanding of which type of solution is best suited for the desired business outcome,” Phillips said. In addition, Phillps asserted that enterprise platforms such as ASP.NET, Core, and Kong API are solutions that allow for greater efficiency and flexibility when interacting with typical non-functional requirements such as security, performance and reliability.
According to Phillips, Particular Presence customers benefited from transitioning their infrastructure from traditional data centres to cloud and re-architecting solutions, allowing them to take full advantage of economies of scale. The company intends to continue to lay “pillars of success” by implementing well-architected, cost-effective, secure, operationally optimised, and performance-efficient solutions. He pointed out that customers’ expectations are changing as technology evolves. In the coming months, Particular Presence will be launching various programmes specific to the Caribbean context in partnership with AWS global. In addition, they will be working alongside their partner Kong to secure enterprise API platforms that will accelerate innovation. They also intend to have educational initiatives in the form of events and trials to sensitise customers to these solutions.
Inspired by his father, Phillips expects to continue to contribute significantly to the development of technical teams by exposing them to international opportunities to develop the technology industry in Jamaica and pay it forward. He believes that this will increase the standard of living in the wider society and make Jamaica the ideal place to live and work.