Biography

To some Ian Chilvers is a friend; a member of the family; a co-worker; a colleague.  Ian Chilvers is also the Operations Director of Prolateral Consulting Ltd; the owner and part owner of several other companies and interests; and an entrepreneur.

He is often considered the big picture person who makes things happen with his core business interests in Information Technology and Security.

Ian was born in the UK but moved to South Africa with his family at a very early age, where he did most of his schooling.  One of his fondest memories was rushing home from school each day to a nice cool drink and a swim in the pool in the garden whilst waiting for his father to come home from work so he could steal away his briefcase and play at being the boss of a big company.

Due to an economic down turn in the 80’s the family returned back to the UK where Ian finished his education and moved into further education.  Belonging to a computer club at school he would spend many hours after school tinkering on a BBC Model B computer before later progressing onto IBM PC’s.

After graduating with a degree in Electronics and Electrical Engineering he started his career in the microwave engineering industry for cellular and satellite communications.  Working on many software/firmware solutions to augment the rapidly growing 2G, 2.5G, and 3G networks.

Holding many positions within several microwave manufacturing companies Ian progressed from software engineering to networking engineering, infrastructure design, information security and management. Looking after the UK sites initially, Ian later progressed to covering the EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa) regions, finally leaving the industry as the global head of IT for a company called Mitec Telecom.

After leaving the telecoms industry Ian formed a company called Prolateral Consulting along with his business partner Craig Fisher with whom he had worked alongside in various roles since 1994.  The birth of Prolateral was in February 2003 with its core business providing local IT support services for local businesses.

By late 2003 Prolateral had developed and released its flagship product ‘profilter’ a totally white label hosted spam filter solution.  This was the start of the message management and security division within the company.

Early in 2004 Prolateral launched its IT Security auditing services including host and site penetration testing, security assessments and computer based forensics for both civil and criminal investigations.

Following the concept of white label solutions Ian created several dot com sites offering services such as spam filtering, secure email services, web hosting, domain name servicing & hosting, and even online dating services.

Ian is a great believer in supporting local businesses as well as local charity and voluntary groups.  He works closely with his business partner supporting the local Rotary Group and also supports the Bedfordshire Police Special Constabulary.

Ian holds many industry certifications including but not limited to, Microsoft MCSE, Novell MCNE, Cisco qualified, directory qualified in LDAP, Active Directory, eDirectory, and project management (Prince2).

In his spare time Ian enjoys spending time with his family and friends and is a keen amateur photographer. Plus on the odd evening you will even find him doing Ceroc at one of the local venues.