Welcome to the MDS web site.

Drew Rockwell

Chief Executive Officer

Drew Rockwell is the Chief Executive Officer of MDS. Mr. Rockwell joined Lavastorm Analytics in 2002 to lead its transformation to a global analytic software and services company, and he remained as Chief Executive when the company was acquired by MDS in 2005. He assumed responsibility for MDS operations in 2010.

He has 32 years of executive and management experience in the communications and software industries. Prior to Lavastorm Analytics, Drew served as Chief Operating Officer of MCK Communications, and he began his career at Verizon, where he held executive positions in general management, sales, marketing, operations, and corporate strategy and development. He is an Honors graduate of Dartmouth College.

Dewi Thomas

Vice Chairman and Director of Strategy

Dewi led the formation of MDS in 1996 and has grown it into a strong business solutions company through organic growth and strategic acquisitions. MDS now has operations in three continents and counts many world-leading communication service providers as its customers.

The company originally grew out of the IT division of Martin Dawes Telecommunications, then the leading European mobile virtual network operator, which was sold to BT in the 1990s. Dewi played a key role in establishing MDS as a customer-focused company at the cutting edge of telecommunications and customer management software innovation.

Dewi first joined the MDS group in 1987 as finance director of Martin Dawes Telecommunications. In this role, he was closely involved in the development of the business from a small regional player into a pan-European operator with a subscriber base in excess of 1 million at the time of its sale. As a result of this experience Dewi has extensive knowledge of the operator business and thoroughly understands the challenges of the industry. This knowledge and expertise has proved crucial to MDS’ current success.

Dewi led the acquisitions of Lavastorm Technologies and Visual Wireless to create a leading provider of business assurance solutions for the telecommunications sector, Lavastorm Analytics, as well as targeting other market segments such as transportation and utilities.

Prior to joining the MDS, Dewi was a senior manager at the international accounting firm KPMG, where he was engaged in audit, advisory and corporate finance work providing services to a wide range of clients.

David Thomas

Group Chief Financial Officer

Dave heads up finance and commercial for MDS. He is the conscience of the business, ensuring we take commercially viable decisions for the benefit of the company as a whole.

Dave left KPMG in February 2004 to take up the role of CFO at ALG Software and helped double its size, with profitable growth, within two years. He eventually drove the sale of the business to Business Objects for more than thirty times EBITDA. MDS, which he joined in October 2009, represents Dave’s third CFO role within an international technology business.

Away from work Dave’s spends as much time as possible with his two young children (and even occasionally his wife) and tries (but usually fails) to keep himself fit. A keen Rugby Union fan who played second row for various clubs back in his native north east, Dave was also once a sprinter, clocking a PB of 10.5 seconds for the 100m.

Gary Haynes

Chief Operating Officer

Gary has over 20 years of commercial IT experience working exclusively for enterprise product vendors, software houses and consulting service providers. Gary's expertise spans a range of domains, including software engineering and quality, solution architecture, business development, large-scale programme delivery and outsourcing. His customer management skills have been forged in a variety of industry sectors, including Financial Services, Retail, Defence, Travel, Media and Entertainment, Telecommunications & Utilities. This gives him a strong blend of IT and business skills in both pre- and post-sales environments. In recent years Gary has specialised in managing 'The Business of IT', coordinating the development, implementation and validation of business transformation projects.

Prior to joining MDS, Gary was European Director of Delivery for the Outsourced Product Development group of Hitachi Consulting. He spent 6 years working for IBM and IBM business partners driving solutions for enterprise service oriented architectures as well as call centre, application and data centre optimisation. He has implemented product development programmes running to tens of thousands of development days, and initiated and managed large scale offshoring engagements. Regardless of size of project and industry sector, however, Gary is a firm believer in the constant striving for improved professionalism, customer respect and the art of communication.

Barry Dowd

Chief Commercial Officer

Barry is MDS' Chief Commercial Officer and leads the industry's strongest, most committed customer management team.

He heads up customer care and is responsible for our project management office along with all customer-facing support teams. This includes implementation, set-up and testing, training, business consultancy, business continuity, customer care and service desk management.

Barry has been with MDS since 1989, starting out at Martin Dawes Telecommunications as a graduate trainee. He spent a number of months in each of the key business units of a mobile service provider, giving him an excellent grounding in all aspects of our customers’ business and initiating his strong career development within MDS.

Between 1983 and 1993 Barry was also a professional Rugby League player for Widnes RLFC, during which time they became World Club Champions and he collected many commendations. The commitment and energy from which his club benefited is now entirely focused on his family and our customers.

David Mathers

Vice President, Global Sales

David heads up MDS’ sales, leading a highly motivated team of industry experts.

He has over 25 years' experience in telecoms industry sales and marketing. One of his early, memorable roles was as salesman for Martin Dawes, targeting the then nascent mobile phone industry. During his sabbatical from the organization he built and ran sales teams for his own businesses as well as for an international blue-chip supplier to over 80 tier one operators globally.

David rejoined MDS in 2004, building up an outstanding customer account management team before progressing to Vice President, Global Sales in 2009.

Matt Hooper

Chief Marketing Officer

Matt Hooper was appointed as Chief Marketing Officer of MDS in August 2010 and is responsible for the company’s global marketing operation.

Previously Matt was CMO of Celona Technologies, leaders in enterprise data management software, responsible for positioning the business to achieve revenue growth of 200% in two years. Prior, he was EVP Marketing at Colibria AS, a global leader in mobile instant messaging infrastructure, responsible for all aspects of Colibria’s marketing operation and strategy, enabling the company to achieve a market leadership position in 18 months with revenue growth of over 300%.

Matt brings extensive experience to MDS, achieved through 16 years of working in enterprise software and communications marketing, product management and business development.

Matt was also Director of Product Marketing and Director of Product Management for QUALCOMM and was a founding Executive Vice President of Marketing and Alliances at Elata, the SDP pioneer, being instrumental in enabling the business as a leader in mobile Service Delivery Platform solutions leading to their acquisition by QUALCOMM in 2005.

Matt has also held senior marketing positions in the UK and overseas with Orange, BT Global, Hewlett Packard and Parametric Technology (PTC).

Matt holds a Degree in business studies and is an MCIM member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. He is also a member of the CMO Council.

Andy Peers

Vice President, Central Services

Andy is responsible for MDS’ award-winning managed service, offering operators and services providers proven, flexible solutions internationally.

He has 20 years experience in the telecommunications industry with a solid background in IT, finance and revenue assurance services. He leads the assured delivery and management of many end-to-end billing solutions for global Communications Service Providers, including BT and GoGo.

The success of MDS’ managed service rests on Andy’s commitment to two things. He firmly believes that, to run a customer’s activity successfully, its management needs to be completely transparent and the team behind it – completely immersed.

He heads up a team that maps itself to the culture of the customer. It measures itself on delivering award-winning service on their behalf and engendering confidence and trust. Andy also ensures MDS backs-up managed service performance thoroughly, with service level agreements that assure all points of the customer’s solution.

Pete Taberham

Vice President, Engineering Services

Pete Taberham leads the delivery of our software solutions. He is responsible for ensuring they are of industrial strength quality, meeting and exceeding the stringent criteria of operators and service providers.

It is always a challenge to deliver against time, cost and quality. Pete excels at controlling what he calls “the pendulum effect”, whereby the focus of a programme can swing too far to one point or another. For example, very loose processes with a quick, low-cost delivery. In this case the quality of the deliverable suffers, pushing time and cost back up to make it fit for purpose. This can lead to over compensating on the next programme, when the pendulum swings to a different extreme, perhaps overburdening processes which deliver quality – too late. It is a false economy to aim for two out of three of the main elements of delivery.

Pete’s key achievement is to find the centre point of the pendulum, getting you to the most efficient process to deliver against time, cost and quality.

Pete joined MDS from Onetel, the telecommunications arm for Centrica, where he was head of business systems. At Onetel he was responsible for several key programmes including delivery of a replacement billing and CRM system. Pete also led the system consolidation programme to bring Onetel, British Gas Communications and Centrica Business Telephony Services together under one brand.