Biography

Matthew Jenkins is an information technologist with a wide range of experience in computer networking, systems administration, and software development. Matt’s ability to quickly learn coupled with his desire to do things safely and efficiently have become a great asset in both his personal and professional life. Matt’s hobbies include horses, computers, writing, and photography.

Matt was born in a rural area of West Virginia, yet raised as a child in several states across the United States. As Matt’s parents moved with work, Matt found himself experiencing a well-rounded life in Texas, California, Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia. Matt’s parents would return to West Virginia in time for Matt to complete high school and begin college at Salem-Teikyo University where he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science / Mathematics with an emphasis in Computer Science.

During his childhood, Matt began to tinker with computer equipment that his father would bring home from work. To meet other tech savvy friends, Matt began to participate in forums on the early Compuserve system and BBSes (bulletin board systems) with a 300 baud modem. Later, as a teenager, Matt ran The Doorway BBS while living in Atlanta. Matt began to learn the C programming language as he developed new features for his BBS.

At the dawn of the graphical Internet, Matt began to learn HTML to develop his own website. Soon he learned other Internet languages such as Java, ASP, and PHP. Using these skills, he started his own website, volunteered as a webmaster for Salem-Teikyo University, and helped friends develop various Internet sites. In college Matt quickly picked up C++ and assembler. As a challenge, Matt would take many assignments that were to be compiled for Microsoft Windows and develop them for the UNIX X Window System.

In college, Matt found a hobby outside of computers – horses. With no prior knowledge of large animals, Matt found himself quickly learning to take responsibility of two American Paint Horses his parents brought home. Horses require a true leader: one that is patient, communicates clearly, is responsible, and only shows authority when required. Through them Matt has learned how to be a better team leader and true friend. Horses, despite being a lot of work, provide relaxation from the chaos of a fast paced career such as information technology.

Out of college, Matt began working as a network and systems administrator for Salem International University. After upgrading to a T1, the university quickly found their infrastructure was not ready for over a thousand resident students, let alone hundreds of employees and tens of thousands of Internet visitors. With his Linux experience, Matt deployed essential services including ipfwadm firewall, DHCP, internal DNS, and mail services (SMTP, POP3, and IMAP). Furthermore, Matt created an NT domain using Samba which provided file and print sharing services to a central file server. As students required Internet access in their dorms, Matt assisted with deploying 802.11b access points throughout the university, configuring rate limiting and QoS, and logically separating students from other campus workstations.

After Salem, Matt had an opportunity to work for Analytic Services, Inc. as a software developer. It was there Matt had the opportunity to join a team dedicated to providing quality research and development for various government entities. Matt worked on various projects including Naive bayes text categorization, biometric enrollment and identification, and Internet crawling utilities. Many of these projects were developed under the CMMI model in UNIX C, Microsoft .NET managed C/C++/C# and Visual Basic. Matt also maintained the network and servers for ANSER’s Fairmont site.

After ANSER’s contract for the Fairmont site was not renewed, Matt joined TMC, who was partnered with ANSER at the time. Matt’s primary responsibility was to manage the IT infrastructure at TMC and many of their commercial clients. As TMC’s contracts grew, Matt assisted in deploying Linux and AIX servers used for the development of software which collected weather data for long-term archival. TMC was purchased by Global Sciences and Technology.

During the transition to GST, an opportunity became available for Matt to work as a network and systems administrator for Fairmont State University. The university was going through a complete redesign of their infrastructure and was working closely with Agilysys, Inc. and Allin Corporation. Matt was part of a team that migrated over 30,000 Active Directory accounts to a new forest and provisioned existing mailboxes between multiple clustered information stores. During the implementation, Matt assisted in installing new Cisco routers, adaptive security appliances, Cisco lightweight wireless access points, and an entire Cisco VoIP solution. While at the university, he was also responsible for installing and maintaining VMWare Infrastructure on IBM and Dell blades that utilized a DS4800 SAN, which increased the reliability of services to students, faculty, and staff. Later, as a cost savings to the university, Matt migrated student email services to Microsoft Live@edu, which later transitioned into Office 365.

After accomplishing major career goals at Fairmont State, Matt joined Fusion Technology to use his experience to engineer Identity and Access Management solutions for various customers. It was here he had the opportunity to engage other teams to transition major applications to using utilizing SaaS. While working with Fusion, Matt was the resident subject matter expert for IBM Security software including Access Manager, Identity Manager, and Federated Identity Manager products. These services, along with IBM WebSphere Portal, Splunk, Nagios, custom Java applications, and RedHat Enterprise Linux OS images were hosted on VMWare vSphere to provide IaaS to a multitude of customers.

After leaving Fusion, Matt worked as a contractor and now as an employee at a large financial institution for a multitude of customers. Matt's primary responsibilities are building and maintaining Enterprise and Customer Identity and Access Management Systems. Due to the rapid evolution of technology and a strong desire to host infrastructure closer to customers, Matt has been working to improve build times of IAM systems utilizing common commercialized open source software. By moving applications to container orchestration platforms, utilizing automation software, and implementing DevOps practices, Matt continues to decrease overall time to market on large scale IAM systems. When not building systems, he is usually helping developers integrate their applications and APIs utilizing OAuth, OIDC, and other authorization and authentication standards.

While not at work, Matt enjoys time with his family and horses on their small farm in West Virginia. Much of Matt’s time is also occupied with helping various volunteer organizations provide community services for both people and pets. Matt also enjoys being an amateur equine photographer whose works can be found on his Flickr photo site. If Matt is not out on the trail with one of his horses, he can probably be found at his desk tinkering with the latest technology.