John Roche has been developing and managing the development process for 2 decades. Trained as a Mechanical Engineer, he spent a decade as a process and manufacturing engineer in the electronics industry. When his boss asked why he spent so much time in front of his computer, instead on on the shop floor, he knew it was time for a career change.

Off he went starting his own company, developing software for manufacturing companies, as well as many other industries, such as construction, financial services, finance, logistics and many more. Each industry has the same issues, controlling costs and deriving business value from the large amounts of data that was collected as a by product of the business.

In those days, Microsoft Excel was the tool of choice. Initially, John convinced owners that Excel was not a database, and spent much of his time exporting Excel into the desktop databases of the time. Over many years he built applications on top of dBase, Access, Foxpro and similar databases. With the advent of client server environments, those databases became Sybase, Oracle and SQL Server.

Eventually, SQL Server became the de-facto database for small to medium size companies, due to cost and familiarity with Windows. John became expert in installing, configuring and managing SQL Server for his clientele, as well as developing desktop and web front-ends to manage the data.

Around 2000, Microsoft began developing BI tools that were used to visualize and analyze the collected data. Analysis Server was soon used to organize large amounts of historical data, and it could be visualized in Excel and what was then known as 'Office Web Components', that could visualize an Analysis cube  in the browser and allow ad-hoc analysis via drag-n-drop.  Combined with Reporting and Integration Services, which were free components of SQL Server, BI was becoming his specialty.

Then came the cloud.

eInfosystems internal systems went from racks of servers doing dedicated tasks, to a single rack of virtualized servers, to rented servers in the cloud that could be scaled up and down with a mouse-click. EIS  still has a single, small on-premises virtualization server for local development, but the majority of our environment is in Microsoft Azure. We migrated our Team Foundation Server to Microsoft DevOps, which made team software development easier and allowed us to use skilled developers from anywhere in the world.

Today, EIS, with John the lead tech resource,  specializes in Microsoft BI. PowerBI evolved into the optimal way to accomplish visualization and analysis, with Excel still a valuable tool for the same.  Corporate cloud adoption began to grow exponentially, and John has remained at the forefront of this technological innovation.

John is currently making a living designing data warehouses, using the Kimball methodology for designing and implementing , on-prem and in the Azure cloud. He is also the companies SME for Azure Data Warehouse, Analysis Services, Master Data Management and reporting.