Paul Tomko's Detailed Work History
My work history is replete with examples of employers experiencing great elation with the results of
my work despite the fact that I have often been hired with little or even no experience directly
related to the job requirements. My ability to learn new products, technologies and industries expeditiously
has ingratiated me to all of my employers.
In my detailed work history below, I highlight some of the products, tools and software that I have worked with in the past,
and point out some of my spectacular achievements at each employer.
Waldner and Company
Oak Brook, Illinois
May 1989 through April 1994
Research Analyst
My first technical position was as a Research Analyst for Waldner and Company, a futures trading company
in Oak Brook, Illinois which has since been acquired. I had just completed my freshman year as an Electrical Engineering and
Computer Engineering student at the University of Oklahoma and interviewed with Waldner and Company for
a summer internship position. Although the president and vice president of the company were very much interested
in me, the person for whom I would directly work was not interested in me at all. He felt I had insufficient experience
and that I would not be able to accomplish anything in a summer internship. Fortunately, he was overruled by the executives,
and in short order, his grudge against me turned into delight, as my performance exceeded all expectations.
The technical staff at the time consisted of two people, whose main job was keeping the Prime minicomputer operational, and were
only able to work on programming in their spare time. Within my first week, all programming tasks had been turned over to me,
and for the remainder of my tenure there, all of the programming was done by me. Many of their programs were in basic, and part
of my job was to convert all of their old basic and older Fortran programs to Fortran 77. Some examples of the programs I wrote
include: Programs to interface with the Bonneville satellite feed and capture and store information in a database on the
Prime minicomputer, Programs to use pricing information and mathematical models to perform simulations and determine the best
parameters for the trading algorithms, Programs to take in pricing in real time and print out trading tickets based on signals
generated by mathematical algorithms, Programs to calculate the past performance of all of the company's trading models
and print reports in an easy to analyze format, programs to print out price charts using HP-GL on plotters, and Programs for
evaluation of option pricing.
One of the special projects which I was put on while at Waldner and Company was a project to study options pricing and develop
mathematical algorithms for options trading. I duplicated the entire workflow of the companies current Futures trading environment
for the purposes of options environment. This meant creating entirely new simulation programs, performance reviewing programs,
trading ticket generation programs, and more, all for the purposes of options trading.
Another duty that I had at Waldner and Company was to be backup administrator for the Prime Minicomputer. Although I had previously
only had experience with PCs and Unix machines, I was able to learn the skills necessary to operate the Prime Minicomputer, as well
as how to perform backups and recovery procedures.
During my time with Waldner and Company, I also worked my way through college at the University of Illinois Chicago Campus,
sometimes taking as many as 20 credit hours. Despite wokring as much as 30 hours a week while attending school, I was able to
graduate with a 4.23 out of 5 Grade Point average, and be an active member and Corresponding Secretary of the Engineering Honor
Society, Tau Beta Pi, and president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
I left Waldner and Company because I was offered the opportunity to build a new Futures Trading Company from the ground up.
Tong Yang Futures America
Chicago, Illinois
April 1994 through June 1996
Computer Systems Supervisor
The same supervisor who originally had not wanted to hire me at Waldner and Company is the one who offered me the
opportunity to designd and build a new Futures Trading Company for Tong Yong Securities, a division of one of the largest
companies in Korea. Although I had previously only worked as a programmer, I knew I had or could obtain the knowledge and skill
needed to build the system.
The first hurdle was to obtain office space. I looked at several locations in the Chicago area, and eventually settled on an empty
space on the 10th floor of the Northern Trust building across the street from the Sears Tower. The space was empty, had bare
concrete floors, and wires and ductwork hanging from the ceiling.
I drew up the office layout, including the trading room, several offices, computer room, wiring closet, conference room, kitchen,
and copy/print room. I specified the locations of network drops, telephone jacks, plain and UPSed electrical outlets, and
water taps. I specified the electrical and HVAC requirements for the wiring closet, computer room and trading floors. I
designed the buit-in trading desk in the trading room to be exactly the right height to allow filing cabinets
underneath and with two levels of monitor supports to allow traders to have as much information as possible at their disposal.
I specified everything from carpet color to paint color, to the style of doors on the offices. I purchased all of the office
equipment including chairs, desks, conference tables, microwave, refrigerator, copy machine, filing cabinets and whiteboards.
After much research I settled on dual Sun Servers in a warm-backup configuration, PCs which could use X-Window emulation software
to run graphical programs on their desktop using the Suns as the application servers, and a variety of both line printers for the
trading floor and laser printers for professional documents. I researched and settled on Reuters ISDN for our primary datafeed and
Bonneville FM receiver as a backup. I configured the Sun servers to connect to the internet and compiled news servers to post and
pull from USENET, now maintained by Google.
With the office built and the equipment purchased, there still remained a monumental task ahead. There were hundreds of thousands of
lines of code to be written. I hired two programmers to assist with the work. However, in addition to setting up and administering
the Unix and Windows platforms, applying patches, automating backups and so forth, I also wrote much of the code myself. Although
we did a small amount of FORTRAN, mainly
because that was the only thing my supervisor could read, we wrote mostly in C and C++. I wrote programs to interface with the
Reuters datafeed, wrote a database and a database management system in which to store the price data, wrote simulation programs
to determine the best parameters to use for mathematical trading algorithms, performance reviewing programs for all of the
mathematical trading models, a historical database of trading model signals, a program to calculate a composite trading signal
based on the monies allocated to each trading models and to print out trading tickets when the composite position for each
commodity changed. I wrote programs to print out price charts on the HP plotter using HP-GL, and programs using Suns XLIB
graphics libraries to display price charts and technical indicators on the screen. The staff that worked for me also wrote a
complex back office accounting system and some of the simulation and performance review programs.
In addition to System Administration and programming, I was also involved in the monthly model performance reviews and gave my
input on assigning trading allowances to each model. I was also in charge of analyzing the grains markets and making trading
recommendations.
Our theoretical performance was quite good, however, my manager, now directly accountable for all gains or losses, was extremely
nervous about risking money in the market. Although we had nearly 5 million to trade, the greatest exposure we ever had was only
about $120,000. As a result, any gains we made were easily eroded by salaries and overhead costs. Eventually, I realized that I
was never going to get the promised performance bonuses, since there was no way we could ever make money with such a small
exposure.
Sybase Professional Services
Chicago, Illinois
June 1996 through November 1997
Consultant
Dismayed by my future prospects with Tong Yang Futures America, into which I had poured my life, and which was obviously destined for a
slow death, I interviewed with Sybase Professional Services in Chicago. Repeating history, the person to whom I would report was
not impressed with me because I had had no relational database experience, however, executive management saw my previous
accomplishments and hired me anyway, as a Junior Consultant. I took a number of Sybase courses which taught me SQL,
Database Administration, Replication, Performance and Tuning, and how to program to the the Sybase API on both the client and server
side. I also learned Powerbuilder, which is Sybase's equivalent to Visual Basic, using it's own language called Powerscript,
and also Optima++ which is the equivalent of Visual C++.
After training, I spent a month or so in the Chicago office, doing System Administration on their Sun server, installing Sybase and
Web-SQL, which was a product which allowed the incorporation of SQL code into Perl scripts to display results of SQL queries
on web pages. I also helped out the other Junior Consultants in their Powerbuilder coding assignments. Additionally, I took the
first test for Sybase Transact-SQL to become a certified Sybase professional.
Tong Yang Futures America kept calling and begging me to come fix their system, which had failed a few weeks after I left. They had not
hired a replacement until after I left, so there had been no opportunity for transition. I insisted that they contact my supervisor
at Sybase if they wanted me to come fix their problem. Finally, the contract was worked out, and I went back to Tong Yang Futures
for what was supposed to be a four hour engagement. Within about 15 minutes, I had fixed their problem, and explained to their
new System Administrator how to deal with the problem in the future.
My first Sybase related client was with Mosby Coropartion, a publishing company in St. Louis. My job was to write a program in COBOL with embedded SQL to
populate a Sybase database from their current IMS system. I had had a small amount of exposure to COBOL in college, but had
not used it in the marketplace. Over the weekend, I studied a COBOL book, and by the time I was on site, had learned enough to
complete the program and automate the daily transfer within a two week window.
My next assignment was with Zurich Insurance company in Schaumburg, Illinois. It seemed clear that they were not
sure what they wanted me there for, or for that matter what they wanted the other two Sybase consultants for. Although I was there
for probably about a month, the most exciting things I did were to assist in the creation of a Powerpoint presentation on
datawarehousing, and to assist a programmer with loading blob data into a Powerbuilder application.
My next assignment was with a division of G.E. Capital which was building a commercial real estate web site. I worked with a small
team there, using the above mentioned Web-SQL and Perl to retrieve property information from the Sybase database and display it
on the web. One of my success stories there was the dynamic building of an RTF file that could be downloaded on the client end
which would contain detailed information and high resolution pictures of the property. A consultant from another company that
had been brought in to do this work had failed to complete the project after two weeks of effort, but I was able to get it working
within a few hours together with the other members of my team.
About this time, I was promoted from Junior Consultant to Consultant, and transferred my knowledge on this project to one of my
colleagues that had started at the same time as me, but was still a Junior Consultant. I moved on to CNA insurance. At CNA, I was
responsible for setting up replication between an OLTP and a Datawarehouse, backing up of servers, and was in charge of interfacing
with a Pyramid Technologies Nursing Consulting application which used Sybase as a backend. There were a number of issues between
CNA, the application, and Sybase. While I was involved with the project I helped to bring down the number of issues from about 20
to only 3, all of which were issues owned by Pyramid.
I was pulled off of this project to work on a high profile project at Anheuser Busch in St. Louis. Anheuser Busch needed an
onsite Sybase consultant to act as onsite vendor support for the 7 breweries around the country, comprising over 50 servers, with
bi-directional replication. The servers interfaced with Programmable Logic Control devices to track information such as humidity,
temperature, pressure, and many other variables. In addition to servers or replication occassionally going down, there were also
issues with data not getting from the PLCs to the replicated locations. These turned out to be with the software which was polling
the PLCs. One of my successes while at Anheuser Busch was the bringing on of an entirely new brewing line which required the
installation of several new Sybase servers, replication servers, and creation of all of the replication definitions and
subscriptions. After a few months, I turned over this client to another consultant from the Dallas office, as St. Louis had been
moved to their territory.
My final client with Sybase was Beloit Corporation, a manufacturer of printing presses and other related products. My project was
to design a stored procedure to pull in an information file of current products, compare it to what was currently in the database
and bring the database in line with the information file, archiving information about any updates or deletes performed.
In addition to this main project, I assisted with database administration tasks, wrote several other stored procedures and
triggers, and assisted in development of one of their Powerbuilder programs.
About this time I was contacted by Grant Thornton, which wanted me to come and be a consultant for them to work on Sybase
products. I was pretty happy with Sybase and indicated that I would not quit to become an employee of another company, but that
I would consider a contract position. I had realized that the work I had done for Tong Yang Futures and for Sybase was the same
or better work as was done by people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. They accepted the proposal and I formed a
corporation.
Tomko Consulting, Incorporated
Del City, Oklahoma
November 1997 to present
Founder and Principal Consultant
My first contract was with Case Corporation in Racine, Wisconsin, now CNH Global N.V. My interview with the executive management
went well, and they were impressed with my past accomplishments, however, the direct supervisor was not impressed with my
background as I had not had a great deal of datawarehousing experience, nor had I had a great deal of experience in writing stored
procedures. However, after giving me an overview of the system, I immediately picked up on some ways to improve their system.
They were loading their datawarehouse nightly from the Geac Smartstream financial application. This load was being done via
Sybase's OMNI Server, a product which allows cross server queries, and also via BCP, which is the bulk copying out of data
from the OLTP server and truncating and reloading the table on the data warehouse side. The nightly update process which began at
10 P.M. was taking well into the afternoon, such that people in the London and Paris offices could not even run any reports against
the datawarehouse here in the United States.
I immediately began putting together a plan for using replication server to replace both OMNI Server and the BCP process.
Replication would allow the changes on the OLTP side to be moved over on a transactional basis so that only things that changed
during the day would come across, instead of whole tables as was currentlty being done. In addition, I made a large number of
modifications and additions to the existing stored procedures used to transform the data on the datawarehouse side. By the time
all of my changes were in place, the data warehouse elapsed load time was around 3 hours.
I worked on several upgrade projects at Case in which they upgraded both the Sybase servers and the Geac Smartstream application,
which involved making changes to the datawarehouse for changes in Geac workflow and additional columns.
After their Datawarehouse Team Lead left, I acted as the team lead, managing all of the datawarehouse projects and distributing
work to the other team members.
Another project involved the creation of another Data Warehouse in Australia. Basically, all of the functionality, stored
procedures, triggers, and so forth existing in the American and European Datawarehouses had to be recreated, tested and
implemented in Australia. There was also the addition of bidirectional replication synchronizing both the OLTP and datawarehouse
servers on all three continents.
There was also a project to verify thatthe datawarehouse was Y2K compliant. All preliminary testing showed that the datawarehouse
was Y2K compliant if it was fed proper data from the OLTP application. As January 1, 2000 came and went, there were no issues
in the datawarehouse.
Another project was the updating of the datawarehouse for conversion to Euro currency. There were a large number of changes that
occurred in Geac for this transition and the transactions had to be updated in the data warehouse as well. For this project,
I actually travelled to Paris to supervise the transition on the cutover date and for a week thereafter to check for anomolies.
My final project with Case Corporation was the integration of New Holland data into the datawarehouses. As new finance centers
were brought onto the Geac Smartstream application, corresponding changes had to be made on the datawarehouse. Also, New Holland
reporting requirements necessitated the addition of new tables in the datawarehouse.
My next contract was with Transunion credit reporting agency in Chicago, Illinois. The Senior Sybase DBA at Transunion was
going on maternity leave and they needed someone to fill in during her absence. While she was out, I took over her duties
of monitoring backups, creating new backup jobs and assisting application developers with query construction and
problem resolution. Additionally, during this time, the junior DBA and I upgraded to Sybase Adaptive Server 12.5.
After September 11, there was not much call for contract work, and I began searching out full time work. I turned control of
Tomko Consulting, Incorporated over to my wife, and I now function only as financial officer, occassionally interfacing with
our accountant, sending out paychecks, distributing W-2s and so forth. Tomko Consulting Incorporated currently has two full time
consultants at Lucent and one part time consultant at Bit 7.
Advanced Financial Solutions
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
July 2002 to September 2005
Technical Analyst
One of the programmers I had supervised at Tong Yang Futures America worked as a Workflow Developer at Advanced Financial
Solutions in Oklahoma City. If not for this contact, it is uncertain how long I might have gone without a job. As I write this,
I consider it a travesty not just personally, but from a business point of view, looking back at my accomplishments in the
market, to think that a person with my talents would be allowed to go without work for any period of time. But there were a lot
of people without work, many of which were more talented than me. Perhaps the greater travesty is that there were people
less talented than me that still did have well paying jobs.
I did not re-enter the marketplace at the bottom of the ladder, but I was only about one step up. The entry position at Advanced
Financial Solutions was as an installer. I entered as a Workflow Developer, who is responsible for configuring the companies
software to the specifications of customers and handing over the results to the installer. The title of this position later
changed to Technical Analyst, absorbing another position, formerly known as Solutions Architect, which was repsonsible for
collecting information about the clients and determining the best configurations of software and hardware to suit the customer's
needs. The Technical Analyst was now responsible for both this and the Workflow Developer roles.
I was recognized for having superior technical skills, and was put into special projects. One such project involved working with
a brand new custom statement printing program which was not yet even out of engineering. I was the first person not in the
engineering organization to install this program. In fact, I was more efficient at installation than engineering, as I at one
point had approximately 20 different banks on my plate for installation of this product, and I was asked by engineering to come
and assist them with some installations. I agreed to help them, but once on site, I found out that there were four engineers there
working on only about 10 banks. Still, I assisted them with their installations while still managing to keep ahead of schedule
on my 20 banks.
After this tremendous success, I was given the opportunity participate in a challenging and potientially high profile project
in medical banking. The project would be an internet accessed ASP which would take claim information from healthcare providers,
payment information from insurance companies, and payments from banks and do a three way reconciliation, uploading the results
into the healthcare providers patient information system. Complicating this was the fact that most insurance companies pay via
paper, and every insurance company had their own format, and sometims had multiple formats depending on where the claim was
processed. This required the use of OCR to read the data, understand it's meaning and translate the results into ANSI x.12 standard
Electronic Data Interchange files. My role in this was initially to be operations manager for the system, and as such I
wrote all of the operations manuals, policies and procedures to conform with HIPAA and EHNAC (Electronic Healthcare Network
Accreditation Committee) requirements. I also made recommendations on hardware, including a disaster recovery site.
I became the owner of the OCR system and attended classes to learn how to create the forms and applications used by Anydoc
software to pull data off of the Explanations of Benefits forms. As usual, I was a star pupil in the classes, and was the first
one done with the exams, even finishing before the Professional Services employees from Anydoc who were auditing the class. I even
finished an extra credit exam which the teacher had said that anyone who figured out how to do it would automatically pass. I
have now been accredited in OCR for Anydoc forms and their AnyApp EOB product.
I have also been involved with another Advanced Financial Solutions product called e-Stor. This is an ASP which allows banks to
send us their check images, and we maintaint the archive, backups, disaster recovery sites and take care of all maintenance.
The banks can do research over the internet on the images in the archive, and their internet banking customers can view the images
and online statements for their accounts. A host of other services are also available connected to this product. I was brought in
to assist with hardware selection, analyzing security risks, network needs, readiness of products to be used in an internet
environment, writing conversion programs, and setting up and supporting banks on the service. I wrote documentation for backup
and recovery and growth plans encompassing hardware, software, network bandwidth and personel.
Recently I was assigned the task of completing the Statement of Work for a high profile client. Advanced Financial Solutions
was purchased by Metavante in June of 2004, and this account is the first reference customer from Metavante. I was selected to
determine the requirements and specific needs of the client, and will be responsible for putting together the proper peices of
hardware and software for their environment, as well as interfacing with engineering for any custom requirements they may have.
Oklahoma Property Network
Del City, Oklahoma
June 2004 to present
Partner
In 2004, I teamed up with a long-time friend and coworker to form a real estate investment and property management company
called Oklahoma Property Network. Our vision for the company is to provide reasonably priced quality housing.
Our occupancy rate rate has been very high, and our cash flow has been positive. We have 8 units currently and are anxious to purchase more. We are also seeking investors to help us grow our business in the area of multifamily housing.
Critical Technologies
Edmond, Oklahoma
September 2005 to present
Product Manager
During my last few months at Advanced Financial Solutions, I was in negotiationsfor employment at Critical Technologies. Several of the people I had worked with at Advanced Financial Solutions were redeveloping the technology for automating healthcare payment processing which AFS had given up on. I was the only person in Oklahoma and only one of 20 or so people in the world with the knowledged to develop the templates to OCR information off of Explanation of Benefits forms. I took a position as a Product Manager for the OCR Technologies.
I worked with Critical Technologies largest client, and was given
responsibility for firstline support for the client. I also developed OCR templates and directed the efforts of another individual whom we had trained in the
OCR technology.
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Since February 4, 2004