Clifford Heath's Career Highlights

After Clifford built his first product in 1983 (a personal filing system with rapid indexing and network potential), his work for Hewlett-Packard on 4GLs, databases and end-user query and reporting tools helped establish their Australian Software Operation as the largest exporter of software in Australia. This software was deployed in many enterprises, even playing a part in running nuclear power stations.

Upon HP's closure of the ASO, 25 staff performed a buy-out of the technology which Clifford had spent over two years developing, and Open Software Associates brought the OpenUI product to market at the international CEBIT trade fair in 1991. OpenUI was a cross-platform client-server development environment, with goals and some design features very like those of Java; except that OpenUI delivered on those goals by 1993, whereas Java took until at least 2005 to even approach the same capability, and was largely relegated to the server room, not the desktop. Being based on message-passing, it had native network capabilities that are only now being realised again through Web 2.0 technologies. OSA also became the first .com.au registered in the Domain Name System (DNS).

OpenUI was used in many key industries, including German banking, Australian telcos, and (by Tandem) to build the new international trading platform for the NASDAQ. Its use in banks led Clifford to become expert and deeply involved in the new applications of public key cryptography (internet banking and online share trading), which remain the foundation of all Internet security. He published the first open source Certification Agency (CA), based on OpenSSL, and was involved in the Mozilla Crypto Group, whose stunt triggered a change in US export control policy for encryption techologies.

Open Software Associates spawned a new products business, ManageSoft, which used Clifford's patented method for updating sets of files across remote networks. Today this method is the foundation of almost all forms of automatic software update. ManageSoft (a Microsoft Gold Partner) has products deployed on upwards of ten million enterprise computers globally, managing major banks, government departments and diplomatic services, national postal networks, oil companies, state-wide education networks, etc. Clifford's expertise in enterprise scale data architecture and tools enabled him to effectively automate large parts of the application development cycle and produce a truly remarkable business agility.

This capability has been effectively exploited by Flexera in their enterprise software license compliance products, after they purchased the ManageSoft company in 2007, shortly after Clifford had left to found Data Constellation.

Clifford's business with Data Constellation has included assignments with a Japanese insurance company building claims lodgement solutions, with a large supplier of SaaS solutions for managing apprenticeships, and with a major Australian bank as an Enterprise Data Architect. The bank project involved building an enterprise-level data federation framework in support of a new service desk product deployment, after the vendor of that product failed to successfully deploy their own product and was thrown out.

Clifford has an exceptionally wide range of technical skills, including information modeling, cryptography, SQL Server, Active Directory, design for and analysis of system performance, Ruby, C++, C#, SQL and ORM2. Outside IT, Clifford is an advanced ham radio licensee and a competent designer of electronics, as well as a luthier, having built several guitars. Clifford is a skier and orienteer, and has competed for Australia in Radio Direction Finding.