Steven Ellis – Technical Director OpenMedia
As developer of OpenMedia’s myPVR product Steven brings with him over 18 years IT experience, much of which as been in the areas of Open Source, Linux and Enterprise Infrastructure.
Whilst based in the UK Steven worked as a developer with a wide variety of companies on a number of media related projects. His clients included such diverse companies as Apple Computer, BBC, Reuters, Associated Press, WordPerfect inc, Motorola and Philips. These projects were developed on and for a wide variety of platforms including MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Aix, Solaris and Irix.
Since emigrating to New Zealand in 1999 Steven moved into internet infrastructure implementations and troubleshooting for large enterprise customers. This work often encompassed media technologies such as audio and video streaming. As part of his role he has assisted a number of customers with a transition to a very cost effective Linux based environment.
His passion for FOSS comes from both his development and operational experience. As well as co-running OpenMedia he has built and lead a number of operational teams, including the SSO Delivery Team at IBM NZ, through which he’s with a number of enterprise accounts in the Asia Pacific market. He has also designed a scalable Linux environment for a large international telco. His experience provides an interesting bridge between the contrasting worlds of the consumer versus large scale business.
A long time Linux user and advocate, he has been using Linux on the desktop for over 10 years, and has a full video editing and DVD production environment hosted on Linux. He is very proud to be an Linux and Open Source User but understands that large enterprises operate in a largely heterogeneous environment. Sometimes a mix of proprietary and Open Source components will be the perfect solution for their business.
Spotting an opportunity to offer a different class of product for the NZ market, he is very proud to be involved in OpenMedia’s myPVR consumer product. Fully endorsing the Open Source philosophy OpenMedia has contributed numerous enhancements from the development of myPVR back to the MythTV and Linux community.
Steven gives talks on FOSS at the Auckland Linux User Group, as well as presentations and organised tutorials for many of his customers and employers including Optimation Limited and IBM New Zealand. Recently he presented at a number of major international conferences and local events including 2007 Open Source Developers Conference in Brisbane, Linux.conf.au 2008 in Melbourne, and Auckland BarCamp. He will shortly be in the US to speak at O’Reilly’s OSDC and Linux World.