Mr. Baloul led the development of the reservation system architecture, including booking engine and database. He hired and trained staff, including software developers, system engineers, database administrators, and executives. He improved the organizations technology performance across the board and was originally brought in as an emergency consultant. He successfully rescued the enterprise from a database disaster affecting the company’s most important, mission critical application – the cruise manage- ment and reservation system. He was immediately thereafter, offered a director position to lead the corporate initiative in analyzing and eventually acquiring the reservation system software. He was successful in completely reverse engineering the reservation system software and redesigning the architecture to reach maximum booking performance leading the company to its most successful opening season – more than $18M in bookings in one day. Mr. Baloul developed a clear reservation system development road map. He composed system and database administration guides and hired and trained new technical staff. He completely overhauled the IT infrastructure, implemented SDLC procedures and policies, version control, and issue tracking system. Mr. Baloul spearheaded the production migration of Oceania and Regent to Citrix, 64 bit virtual Microsoft SQL environment, which significantly improved the performance of the reservation system architecture, from Web to database by more than 57K%, and was catego- rized as PCH IT’s biggest success stories. He contributed Web site improve- ments, landing page recommendations, e-mail campaign tactics, and many other eCommerce marketing strategy changes that lead to significant increases in conversion ratios and ROI resulting in billions of dollars in profit. He supported reservation system application improvements and analyzed and identified key application and SQL trends. He recommended improve- ments based on newly designed custom activity metrics and reports and implemented compliance, naming conventions, security entity types, and application to database access relationships. He also implement significant efficiencies in code and deployment and monitoring on critical production databases using Red Gate, vFogLight, and WUG. He automated system processes, including database refresh processes for all environments. 

Oceania Cruises, Regent Seven Seas Cruises, Prestige Cruise Holdings, Inc. | February 2012 - November 2012