Limerick innovator dreams up way to end tech outages

A LIMERICK innovator has come up with a technical solution which looks set to minimise the impact of crippling technology outages.

Disruption to the systems of CloudStrike and AWS have caused chaos, the former estimated to have cost Fortune 500 firms $5.4bn in lost revenue.

But John Creed, pictured below, who hails from Elton, and works as a senior engineer at Motorola in Cork, has come up with a solution which will tackle interruptions to technology systems early on - and he has had the technology patented, which prevents the copying of it.

In a previous role working with Dell - which of course has a huge operation in Raheen - Mr Creed, who hails from the small south Limerick village, discovered the impact of disruptions and system outages.

He thought about what he could do to stop problems in their tracks.

He found outages to systems often occur when software upgrades are being carried out.

“What I saw is you could have a cascading situation where such an upgrade happens and it causes a system failure. But it’s not just that system. The upgrade has been rolled out globally. So you have cascading system failures in the field. How this patent works is we have cloud intelligence.

“So when you start an upgrade of any kind of change on a field, the system will intelligently decide: If I’m going to do a certain upgrade, will I dial home to a central headquarters in the cloud and ask it is safe to proceed with, for my system and my configuration,” Mr Creed explained.

He compared the process to a “pre-flight safety check” - predicting issues before they happen based on previous experience.

His innovation means a problem with a system upgrade is flagged early, so it impacts the fewest people.

“With this, if you push updates out, it will learn it is a bad update. But it will learn early. So an insignificant subset of systems would be impacted, but then the shutters would come down on the update. The outage which happened with CloudStrike, which cost the global economy billions would have been stopped in its tracks,” Mr Creed added.

A serial innovator, the businessman has had an incredible nine products patented in the USA in the space of just one year.

Raised in Elton, Mr Creed always had an instinct for business - as have his ancestors.

His grandfather, also John, was an egg-trader, selling to the British market. This man also set up a grocery store in the townland, known as J Creed.

The shop was then run by his parents Mary and James, who was also an agent for Dairymaster.

John’s brother Robert still runs the grocery store today, one of the few truly independent stores of its type.

“Growing up in this environment instilled an entrepreneurial spirit in me,” Mr Creed confirmed.

To sharpen his business skills, the father-of-four, now living near Ovens near Cork city, undertook a masters in business at University College Cork.

Asked how close we are to seeing the end of system outages, with this technology - which will be pushed out by Dell - he said:

“I would imagine pretty close”.

“This technology now exists. What happens when technology exists is that people will demand it be put into place. When systems go down, businesses grind to a halt, services are not rendered, people are not working.

“So it’s quite critical. I would imagine this solution in this patent, when adopted, would provide a lot of resilience and an impetus to global economic growth,” he said.

“You're not just talking about the financially crippling outages based on the denial of service of business applications. Some of these systems are running critical infrastructure, like 911 response centres. You're talking about life-and-death situations.”