Our Experts
Cake Solutions’ unique combination of web savvy and business acumen blend to create the perfect mix for your business. The key members of our team are:
Management Team
Guy Remond
Managing Director
Guy Remond brings over fourteen years of business experience to Cake Solutions. Guy has been pivotal to the company’s success buy building relationships with securing clients such as UKTI (part of the DTI), the NES group and NUS Services.
Guy is also the IT Chairman for the Variety Club children’s charity responsible for continually improving the IT infrastructure and process for the organisation. He also sits on the North West Variety Club committee as Appeals Chairman where plans for local fund-raising events are discussed and organised. Cake has been involved with the Variety Club since adding an events section and making the North West website more search engine friendly. An e-commerce section where the public can book and make payment for Variety Club events is current being developed and implemented. Cake is a supporter of the Prostate Cancer Support Association (PSA) and develops the PSA website.
Ian J Brookes
Non-Executive Director
Ian trained as an Accountant and gained extensive commercial experience whilst being employed by Price Waterhouse Chartered Accountants, one of the world’s largest professional services firms and the largest auditing firms. He has also been a Non-Executive Director of five of the fastest-growing technology and services-based businesses in and around the North-West.
When Ian merged his company with Lorien, then a private company with £20m turnover, he became Group Financial Director. Ian was instrumental to its AIM flotation in 1995 and the Stock Exchange Full Listing in 1997. Throughout the three fund raisings of £35m and eight acquisitions, Ian went to be promoted to Managing Director within the year and then in December 2002 was appointed the Group Managing Director.
Lorien provides IT outsourcing, consulting and staffing services, and is one of the UK’s top ten firms in this sector with a turnover in excess of £180m. Lorien also had a BPO division providing market research, call centre, training, management consulting, digital marketing and brand management services, turning-over £30m.
Ian’s other pursues include: being an active member of the Arts Council; East Lancashire Money Line initiative; and a Freeman of the City of London having been awarded for his involvement in teaching IT standards in the schools of deprived inner City areas.
Pete Evison
Head of Sales and Marketing
Pete has over 10 years business experience within the consumer electronics and IT sectors. His experience includes; retail buying, working with, and visiting companies in the Far East, USA and Turkey; product development and OEM project management with companies such as Marks and Spencer s and British Telecom; and trading/business manager responsible for all areas of business including the key blue-chip accounts.
Pete’s arrival at Cake brings a wealth of business development and customer relationship experience that will help support the growth aspirations of the organisation.
Jan Machacek
CTO/Renowned Author / Java, Spring & Scala Expert
Jan Machacek is the technical director at Cake Solutions, highly experienced Java enterprise architect, consultant and developer with very strong technical and team management skills.
He works best in complex environments where his capable and assured grasp of issues and leadership qualities enable him to provide real value in managing and directing development to successful completion. Jan combines the deep insight of lean and agile management with the theoretical concepts of computer science, low-level programming, UNIX operating systems, RDBMSs and detailed knowledge of the contemporary Java EE frameworks with his authoring and speaking experience to mentor, drive and motivate large development teams.
Jan has demonstrated his technical and agile management skills on numerous projects in the public and private sectors; working with the in-house teams as well as delivering projects at Cake Solutions. He has led teams through the perils of agile software delivery, bringing control and value to the business and the joy of programming back to the technical teams. Jan shares his agile leadership experience in publications for the NCC, at public events and at national conferences.
Alongside several articles, Jan has authored 4 books; the most notable ones are Pro Spring and Pro Spring 2.5. He regularly speaks at conferences and developer events in the UK and abroad and he is the editor of the Open Source Journal.
In his spare time, Jan likes to explore new programming languages and experiment with microcontrollers. Jan also competes in time trials and road races as a member of the Manchester Wheelers Cycling Club.
Anirvan Chakraborty
Senior Consultant/ Java, Spring & Scala Expert
Anirvan (Ani!) was born and raised in Kolkata, India. Anirvan studied Internet Software Systems at the University of Birmingham, graduating in 2005 with a first class MSc degree. Anirvan is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer, an accreditation he has held since 2002, he also holds an Advanced Certificate in Software Engineering from IBM Advanced Centre of Education.
Since joining Cake Solutions, Ani has worked on a number of Cake’s major projects, leading agile teams on several of them. On one of these projects, Ani has been leading a Cake team developing a big central government, knowledge base system and web platform.
Ani was one of the main authors of the best selling ProSpring 2.5 books and has quite a following on his blogs on Java and functional programming. Ani is also one of the SkillsMatter trainers taking the Core Spring (Spring Source) course.
