Born and bred in South Africa, Jaco Olivier, Hyperscale Solutions Architect and Platforms Manager at AC3, headed for Australia about 10 years ago, when the opportunities for both his family and career were just too good to pass up.

His interest in technology and computer software goes back to childhood, he says.

“I was introduced to computers by a friend whose dad had one for his business,” he recalls. “It was many years ago and I think XTs and 286s still existed. I became interested in the mechanics of how computers worked, from the operating systems to being able to control them.”

Olivier’s father enrolled him into a crash course at a local high school, even though he was still in primary school. “I was very young, probably in about year four.”

Fascinated by coding – changing it and breaking it – he eventually wound up studying a BSc in information technology. He picked this as one of the three IT options available because it was focused on business information systems. “So a lot of my electives were around business management,” he says.

And it’s this aspect that has been the throughline of his career to date, despite his various roles that cover the gamut from analyst to developer and beyond. “Programming was important, but I always said, ‘how does it support the business?’,” he explains.

“Technology exists because there is a business problem and for me it’s always about trying to work through what the business problem is and how I can solve it. That may be technology, or it may not. With my career and background, it used to be technology most of the time but then I moved up.”

Crossing the Indian Ocean

After various developer and systems analyst roles in South Africa, his Australian career began at the hospitality tech start-up Kounta (now Lightspeed), where he was a lead systems analyst. He later spent six years at Healthdirect Australia as a solutions architect, where he focused on the architecture and development management of web applications supported by cloud native information management solutions deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS), implementing semantic reference models and delivering high-speed search services through Apache Solr and Elasticsearch.

He believes his preference for AWS is largely historical, as this was the first cloud service he was exposed to. “It was the more dominant and mature cloud service provider at the time, and it just naturally evolved from there. AWS does offer a very rich set of services. “Also, the layout and breadth of documentation and training that AWS provides, for me, is excellent.”

His affinity with the cloud services provider saw him develop into a subject matter expert in all things AWS and a self-proclaimed cloud evangelist, which eventually led him to join AC3 in 2019 as AWS practice lead at the organisation’s Pitt Street office in Sydney. “It was all around how do we manage the relationship with AWS and how do we promote AWS within the organisation and get buy-in?” he says.

At the same time, he was doing solution architecture for key and larger enterprise customers, setting up the frameworks, standards and blueprints that his team could utilise in their customer engagements.

His primary focus remained, as always, on potential business outcomes. Olivier now straddles the business versus the core technology developments at AC3. His titles of Hyperscale Solutions Architect and Platforms Manager see him wearing more than one hat.

“During a normal week I’m managing a team of cloud solution architects and making sure they have appropriate support to deliver world-class services to our customers,” he says. “And then I do consulting for some customers and engagements with them.

“On the other side, I lead a team of platform engineers and together we reimagine cloud native solutions and build new business services to support the AC3 hyperscale business, which translates to a better experience for our customers.”

Challenges

Apart from juggling a few hats, Olivier says his concerns today and, in the future, will still revolve around business outcomes, but now they also have to incorporate sustainability facets. “It’s not just about how elegant your solution can be and how quickly and accurately you can present data to an end-user, but also how economically or eco-sensitive your solution is.

“They’ll want all the processing that comes with a cloud compute, but also be constantly considering the carbon footprint and lowering their environmental impact.”

“It’s going to be a big design thinking evolution of information technology architecture,” he adds.

“You’ll have cost optimisation but also carbon footprint optimisation.”

He further sees a future of decision intelligence where organisations of all sizes will be adopting machine learning and data analytics, either as home grown or SaaS solutions to optimise organisational decision-making processes to near real-time levels.

Highlights

In a career that has developed rapidly to adapt to changing circumstances, Olivier says there have been some notable achievements. One of the most memorable stems from his tenure as lead architect at Healthdirect’s consumer services business unit. The project, which delivered a key organisational solution and is still fully operational today, was creating the organisation’s Medicines Finder.

Consolidating multiple data sources, and ultimately a vast amount of data from Australia’s TGA (Therapeutic Goods Administration), the project enables users to type any medicine name or active ingredient into a searchable database, and it will quickly list all the brand names in Australia that are part of the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods (ARTG).

“You as a consumer can say, ‘here is a known brand name, so I can easily understand what is available in the market as a substitute for a specific brand name of medicine’,” explains Olivier. “It also offers images of how the pills or tablets look and the Consumer Medicines Information (CMI) leaflet that is commonly misplaced the second the package is opened.”

It was a huge undertaking – a six-month project utilising a multi- skilled team of engineers and medical taxonomy subject matter experts, and requiring the design of complex user interfaces, graph database backed APIs and a data-caching solution with impressive capabilities.

As another proud accomplishment, Olivier also nominates a more recent AC3 project in which he built up the company’s standard methodology and framework for how public cloud migrations are approached. The project established a standard approach that is now being used for small engagements all the way up to enterprise level engagements, working through the well-defined stages and processes to complete a successful migration.

Advice

And for those looking to follow a similar career path, Olivier has some salient advice. “Sometimes I say, ‘it’s not a job, it’s a lifestyle’. You need to love what you do.”

If you don’t, boredom beckons, he believes. And you quickly lose touch with the fast rate of technological evolution. “Whatever information sources you utilise to remain ahead of the pack, ensure they are factual and can be trusted. Have a good grasp of new technologies and how they impact, disrupt or can improve business processes. Having a view that addresses both the technology and business facets keeps you well respected among engineering teams, technologists and, most importantly, business users.

“Being able to have a solution conversation with various stakeholders at the technology layer, and then a deep dive into business benefits and impacts is what makes a solution architect or a solution architect manager fairly well respected and utilised in any organisation.”