Our team

Dennis Norgard, Managing Director

Dennis has had a career spanning 35 years in the Information Technology industry. From early beginnings covering the technical aspects - programming, analysis and database administration - he moved on to specialise in project management and consulting, much of it as an independent freelance or a senior associate of IT consulting firms. He has worked in most industry sectors along the way, both government and private, including retail finance, health and telecommunications. During his career, Dennis has had primary responsibility, as Project Director or Programme Manager, for several multi-million pound/dollar projects in the UK, Australia and the USA. Other career highlights include:

• Co-founder and Joint MD of a very successful Systems Integration & IT Consultancy employing over sixty staff in Perth, Western Australia.
• Business Development Director of a £2 million revenue per annum UK-based IT Consultancy, the role including bid management / sales proposals, account management for new clients and resource management for the contractors placed there.

Dennis was an early investor in Quintessence soon after its foundation in 1998, taking on an executive role in 2008 when he was appointed to the Board as part of the company's re-organisation.

Don Smith, Technical Director

Don studied computing at UMIST and specialised in parallel computing. He undertook postgraduate research at Exeter University, studying the use of expert systems for the manipulation of basic structures in programming languages. After two years at ICL working on data dictionaries he moved to Oxford and worked for several small technology start-ups specialising in expert systems technology. In 1997 he cofounded Metamorph Technologies which provided a tool for migration of Oracle Forms 3.0 to PowerBuilder.

In 1999 Don co-founded Quintessence Systems, initially in order to migrate PL/SQL into Java for deployment on the database - the first application of the in2j technology. However it soon became apparent the main migration opportunity was in Oracle Forms. Don directed the extension of in2j to migrate Forms, and subsequently Oracle Reports. His main research focus is now on extending the range of Java platforms onto which the migrated code can be deployed 'out of the box' to include Oracle's middleware-based, internet-oriented architectures such as SOA.

Oliver Tickell, Development Director

Oliver studied Physics at Oxford University where he met Mathematica's founder, Stephen Wolfram who introduced him to the nascent software industry based around the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Los Angeles. In 1981 he was employed by network management specialists Peregrine Systems of Irvine, California, to develop interactive help systems and technical documentation.

Returning to the UK in 1983 he worked for Management Systems and Programming (later re-branded as Manager Software Products) in London, where he designed and implemented help systems for MSP's data dictionary, database design and source code management product suite. In 1986 he transferred to MSP Inc in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he worked with sales and marketing teams to produce a range of promotional publications.

Returning to the UK the following year he moved to Oxford and his career turned to writing, editing and journalism, but in the late 1990s he re-engaged with the world of computing as a web designer constructing his own 'content management system' (2tix.net) for the original purpose of publishing the writings of Edward Goldsmith, founder of The Ecologist magazine. His involvement with Quintessence begun as an early investor in the company soon after its foundation in 1998, but he only took on an executive role in 2008 when he was appointed to the Board as part of the company's re-organisation. The author of Kyoto2 (Zed Books 2008), which proposes a novel, truly global approach to climate regulation, Oliver is also a non-executive director of Earthcare Products, the leading developer and producer of environment-friendly (low global warming potential and high efficiency) refrigerants and cooling and refrigeration systems.