In 1997, KLA Associates and Tencor Instruments Merged

Forming a $1 bn Global organisation that all the investors liked.

I joined as European IT Manager.

It was a complete mess.

The company was ready to grow in Europe, and I had to sort out the IT infrastructure to support that.

In the next three years we went from 4 sites to 12, and 120 or so employees (field sales and field engineers) to about 375.

I had a blast doing it and was totally successful, with many unusual and interesting challenges, failures and successes along the way (think "Y2K remediation", the "Lovebug" virus, stolen servers, lying employees, lying suppliers, hidden vacation days, invisible data centres, exploding fire-suppressant systems and much more).