Stephen Athanas Email Address

Information Technology Leader

UMass Lowell, a midsized public research university located north of Boston, offers full- and part-time students bachelor's, master's and doctoral degree programs online and on campus.

I have over fifteen years of experience managing technology, teams and projects in IT to maximize organizational effectiveness, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. On the technology side, I have always been a generalist, working with virtualization, applications, networks, storage, hardware and almost any component you’d find in a datacenter. I have extensive experience with designing and deploying VMware-based cloud solutions, and am an evangelist for virtualization and cloud technologies. I am active in the virtualization technical community, including speaking at VMworld 2013 and leading the Boston VMware User Group. I especially enjoy designing both the clouds themselves and Microsoft's enterprise applications, such as Active Directory and Exchange running in them. As a leader, I believe that IT should be a strategic partner to the business or organization it serves. I get excited about finding and developing creative solutions to long-standing or complicated business problems that enable people to collaborate, communicate and perform their work better than before. Technology should be an enabling force, but all too often its complexity renders it confusing, or even worse - disabling. Unfortunately, IT has become a cost-sink and a necessary evil in many organizations. I strive to rectify usability and cost issues with scalable, cloud-centric designs that enable flexibility. I'm a motivated and collaborative professional with a service-oriented mindset. Simply stated, IT exists only to further the organization it serves.