Bio

Biography of Samuli

Versatile expertise will be achieved by turning lifelong hobbies into a profession. I have achieved deep knowledge on Best Practices, IT Management, Project Management and System Administration tasks as a team leader and part of a team. Having excellent hands on technical skills from wide area of technologies and solutions gives me ability to develop and optimize systems further ahead without overlooking the importance of guidance. I strongly believe customer oriented attitude, sharing vital knowledge, standards and teamwork is the key to success without forgetting creativity and hard work.

I have lived through IT as Cost Center turning towards Service Center; my next step is to turn IT into a Profit Center. My goal is to find a challenging position where I could fully utilize my extensive knowledge, excellent skills, deep passion and unique view of IT systems.

Information wants to be free and so does creativity which has always playing big part of Samuli's professional and personal life.

Samuli was born up in Finland at spring time 1973, at the eve of big Oil Crisis. Childhood went by peacefully and he was quite busy with playing soccer and fishing during summers, at winter it was time for ice-hockey.

First touch with computers came though friends and local TV/radio shop. Time passed by and school offered some education with computers, first CP/M systems and then continuing with first 8086-based systems, like MS/DOS, PC-DOS, etc. By this time Samuli's curiosity was raising but something seemed to be missing. It was quite boring to play around with computers without any interaction with others. And then came along modems, BBS's and multiuser systems like good old VAX. Samuli was determined that one day this would bring him and his family meat in to the table!

During end of 80's until end of 90's Samuli was studying, learning life, working here and there, building first own BBS (Bulletin Board Systems, early stage of CMS/portals) and in the end building own networks at home, extending knowledge over Internet related technologies such as building websites as hobby for sport teams, including own sport portal (http://www.pelaajaporssi.net) at 2001. During the years of first steps into the world of Information Technology he became familiar with Microsoft and OpenSource systems and solutions including databases such as Access, MySQL, MsSQL.

At the start of 21st century Samuli joined a global leader in international forwarding, Kuehne + Nagel as IT assistant, responsible for supporting national IT Manager with nationwide IT infrastructure and developing in-house sales application for Excel with VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). One of the highlights among developing sales application was a first encounter with AS/400 (aka IBM iSeries) and database DB2. At the same time he found himself working as a part-timer for a small self-storage company, Omavarasto Oy, in Finland who needed his expertise to administer and develop their current IT infrastructure including operational software and web site. One of the highlights was creating an in-house Web application (GUI) which interacts with the company sales application database.

While studying and working simultaneously, unfortunately school didn’t offer challenges and raise Samuli’s personal interest too much. Running into meaningless debates with school teachers who’s knowledge were not really up to the current technologies did not motivate Samuli enough to stay focused 100% to the school. Samuli chose the road of self-learning, learning by doing and LOD (Learning On Demand) which proved to be the best way for him. It has always been like that and after these experiences it was definitely written in the stone. Multitasking was not a problem for Samuli since he has very good built-in multitasking system in him, but it was the motivation and challenges that took him to the road that he is in now.

By start of year 2003, he started in a position of IT Manager in Finland for Kuehne + Nagel with one assistant working for him locally. Samuli was responsible nationwide for the IT infrastructure of Kuehne + Nagel which consisted of various IT systems and networks, including AS/400, Linux and Windows desktops/servers. After summer 2003 he was promoted to be a Regional IT Manager, responsible for running a small team of IT professionals which consisted national IT Managers of Russia and Baltic Countries. Highlights were running IT infrastructure within self-planned budget, building and developing in-house Web based (LAMP=Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) in-house sales application, running team of IT professionals, running multiple simultaneous IT-projects (including EDI-project, eFile-project, migration projects) and last but not least, Samuli loved getting his hands dirty with hands-on work, including 1st and 2nd level User Support and technical PC-support and last but not least, getting familiar with Enterprise level databases (DB2).

Working in a worldwide multinational company brings sometimes opportunities to expanding ones horizon by working abroad, which brings its own challenges to our daily lives. And so Switzerland started calling for Samuli and his professional expertise. After couple of months negations he was offered a position as IT Project Manager for EMEA (Europe, Middle-East, Africa) in which Samuli felt that he had lot of expertise to contribute and in which he could also learn how to administer and run IT systems which consisted hundreds of environments, with thousands of simultaneous users. In these systems, things just have to click, there is no place for errors. He was fascinated to continue his career in such a big enterprise level system and he started his international IT career after hot summer of 2004

During the next years as IT Project Manager (EMEA) for Kuehne + Nagel he was part of running IT Projects related to various migration, in- and out-sourcing, data center consolidation, db2 related database maintenance with SQL, 2nd level user support, user management, scripting languages, security and release & change management for KN’s core application CIEL/400. Highlights were administering and running multinational enterprise level operational software, creating custom scripts with various scripting languages, IT systems and databases (DB2, SQL, IBM iSeries AS/400, Linux, Windows) and IT Projects.

Growing along with multinational worldwide enterprise brings always its own challenges, including the need for creating Data Centers for which company would like to centralize all of its IT professionals on continental basis. Hamburg was calling but Samuli decided to follow his own way since he feels that Switzerland is now his home and his life is in there now. Also the job offer was focused too much towards Application Services only which did not attract Samuli’s professional interests.

Late spring time 2009 it was time for Samuli to try contribute his expertise to a start-up company located in Zürich, Habitus|net Consulting AG, in which he was able to realize his real passion; building a customized IT solutions based on Microsoft and OpenSource, including backup and monitoring. Virtualization (P2V, backup, monitoring) with VMware and XenServer (Citrix) was also part of his job description which fascinates Samuli professionally in many ways. Highlights were Virtualization projects, customized Microsoft and OpenSource solutions for backups and monitoring from desktops/servers down to application level, strategic Web consultations and branding.

While working for multiple companies, Samuli felt always that he needs to express his creativity in many different ways. He has a passionate relation with Open Source and related technologies, including LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), HTML, CSS and various other programming and scripting languages.

These days Samuli keeps on learning and customizing (domain setups, layout, graphics, etc) multiple PHP based CMS platforms, including phpBB (http://www.salibandy.org), Drupal (http://www.skodillac.com), Typo3 and WordPress (http://www.kiwicustom.com) without forgetting development of his own LAMP based Web sites (http://www.pelaajaporssi.net, http://www.madcustom.com). He feels that he has a lot of expertise and knowledge to contribute for Web related projects.

Please do not hesitate to contact Samuli directly via email anytime at samuli.hiltunen@skodillac.com or mobile +41 79 757 95 65.