The Board

Edric Ackland-Snow (Chairman)

Ric is an executive with leadership experience working with startup companies, making him an invaluable source of advice to new emerging businesses.

His career includes 14 years at IBM UK and Canada, where he held senior positions in International Procurement, Product Development and Marketing.

Ric is the “Entrepreneur in Residence” and investment committee member at Create Ventures, a boutique Venture Capital company based in Cambridge, investing in businesses with high growth potential. He is a mentor and advisor to X- sector early stage companies and is a business angel investor. His background as a software and systems application specialist has been instrumental to his success in setting up a number of businesses, including UK Direct Insurance for AIG Corp, the UK special Insurance facility for Aon Corp, and ASA Insurance.

Paul Evans (CEO & Founder)

Paul is a communications software specialist whose career has included development roles at BT Labs where he led the Internet Infrastructure Lab (IIL) and was CTO of a BT spinoff company. He founded Sharedband in August 2003 with the objective of finding new ways of efficiently delivering content across the Internet.

Paul, a former member of the UK Government’s Parliamentary IT’s Programme Committee (PITCOM), has also provided consultancy to a number of companies and has been an investment manager at a UK leading technology investor. He holds a degree from Aston University and is the author of a number of patents.

Dr Peter Radley (Non-Executive Director)

Peter has over thirty years of experience in telecommunications holding senior level positions at Industry-leading companies. His most recent position was as CEO of Alcatel UK. A technology innovations leader and manager, Peter ran the laboratories that invented ADSL. He has worked with the pioneering teams involved in Optical Communications, Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) and Broadband, and during his tenure at the world leading ITT Laboratory, STL Technologies, and Alcatel. While at Alcatel, and prior to becoming the CEO and Chairman of Alcatel UK, Peter held the position of Global Director of Marketing and Business Development, and CTO and President – Mobile Communications. Peter has been a key player with UK Government organizations promoting the rollout of Broadband.

Marek Gumienny (Non-Executive Director)

After leaving Warwick University with a degree in Pure Mathematics, Marek qualified as a Chartered Accountant with Price Waterhouse prior to joining Candover at the end of 1986. Over the next 25 years, he led over 30 deals with an aggregate value of over £8bn. He has operated in a wide range of sectors including insurance and financial services, energy, leisure, support services and industrials. He retired as Chairman of Candover/Arle Capital partners at the end of 2011.

John Yeomans (Non-Executive Director)

John is a director and investor in a portfolio of growth technology businesses, ranging from internet advertising software to numerical search. He is also a director of FirstCapital, which raises finance for and sells technology companies. He has over 30 years experience in the telecommunications sector as an engineer, marketeer and consultant. In his early career he set the UK Government’s telecommunications strategy, and was director of a successful venture-backed MBO. He gained marketing and sales experience at Mitel, then a fast growth New York-listed telecom company. As Strategy Consultant at KPMG, his clients included BT, C&W, Hughes, Oftel, Verizon and Vodafone. At HSBC he was Managing Director and Global Head of Telecom, Media and Technology Corporate Finance, and ran M&A and IPO deals worth over $40bn for clients such as Hutchison, Telenor, NTT DoCoMo, MTNL, OTE, Orange, Esprit Telecom and MSI. He has a starred first degree from Trinity College, Cambridge in Electrical Sciences.

Management Team

Martyn Russell (Chief Technical Officer)

Martyn started as an apprentice at British Telecom where he gained his qualifications in Engineering (Electrical & Electronic). In parallel, Martyn worked in a successful team at BT where he learned much about software development. Later he was head hunted and became principal software engineer for a Swedish firm working with Nokia on the first ever smart phones. Martyn later started his own business employing some of the best Open Source engineers across Europe, boasting clients such as Google, Samsung and Nokia. Martyn is charged with holding, developing, articulating, and continually evolving the company’s strategic technical direction at Sharedband. Martyn helps ensure Sharedband has the best technology offering in a highly competitive space.

Paul Jones (Head of Support)

Paul utilises knowledge gained during 20 years of service and support roles to manage delivery of rich product support experiences to our partners and customers.

Prior to Sharedband, Paul worked for Geonovo, manufacturer of a Personal Safety GPS Alarm Phone. His department served two functions, the first was to support both Alarm Response Centres and Alarm Platform Vendors to integrate the device. The second was to test and quality assure the device’s evolving firmware.

Previously, he has worked for electronics component distributor Rapid Electronics, IT consultancy Millennium Computer Systems and reinsurer C.E. Heath Group. Throughout these positions he consulted, installed, maintained and supported a variety of IT systems in addition to assisting both internal and external users.

His very first role was at Eastern Electricity where he worked within most of its customer service departments.

Keith Churchill (Head of Infrastructure)

Keith heads up the Infrastructure department, aligning the technical capabilities of the Infrastructure with the Businesses requirements. He has over 12 years of experience in building and managing Next-Generation Broadband networks. Technologies implemented include; Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) transmission, subscriber traffic management with Cisco, ALLOT and Sandvine, Metro Ethernet, as well as MPLS within the Service Provider Core. He also brings with him a wealth of valuable experience in ITIL Service Delivery.

Andrew Mayhew (Head of Engineering)

Andrew has worked in development roles for the past 15 years and has experience working with clients end-to-end on web and ecommerce solutions and has brought this knowledge to Shareband. For the last 4 years as senior PHP developer he has developed existing and new systems for the Sharedband and Boosty environments and has now taken on the role as Head of Engineering to continue to improve and innovate the products offered now and in the future.