Ron Bentley

Background

About Ron Bentley

I am currently director of both sales and product management at dataVoice International. I seek common ground between customers, the operations team and the R&D team. The software product we offer is targeted at medium-sized utilities, and we look for cost-effective ways to add capabilities and make it easier to use. I am also technical lead for the sales team. I actively demonstrate the system, and I write our responses to requests for proposals. One of the most enjoyable things about working with a small organizations is that you get to wear many hats! I even created our first generation of training videos. I have played many roles at dataVoice. As director of operations, I was responsible for the public-facing technical infrastructure. I managed the teams that deployed and supported our software. I have direct experience with the technical side of our business. I designed and implemented the network infrastructure between our customers' systems and the public-facing collocation facility. I also designed and implemented several aspects of our Geographic Information System (GIS) tools. I specialize in using open source tools to solve business problems. I have direct experience with Python, Django, Perl, PHP, C, C++, PostgreSQL, PostGIS and QGIS. I work daily with Linux and regularly with virtualization technologies such as libvirt and KVM. I have spent countless hours with the open source tools that support network and web-based technologies, tools like Apache, NGINX, Shorewall, and OpenVPN - as well as the bread and butter tools of any Linux distribution, things like OpenSSH and Bash. In prior contexts, I have worked on a variety of electrical, electronics and communications problems in the power and defense industries. I added Fresnel zone calculations in C++ to the SPLAT RF project, for instance. I provided a Python plugin for early versions of QGIS to help electric utilities maintain models of their facilities. I supported the web-based mapping infrastructure using GeoServer at the Tibetan and Himalayan Library based out of the University of Virginia.