Management Team

Celerity was formed by Chris Roche and Chris Hall with the aim of providing a ‘total business solution’ to clients developing their infrastructure. Chris began his career as trainee salesman selling PCs and PC Networking to SMEs at a time when PCs were in their infancy. He then went on to sell IBM RS6000 systems working for an IBM Value Added Reseller delivering leading edge, highly resilient server, storage, software and networking solutions into the Enterprise space.

In 2002, Chris formed Celerity Limited as Managing Director and built a solid reputation as a specialist Infrastructure partner within the IBM arena. Over the years the organisation has evolved, now delivering multi-vendor, end-to-end business solutions to SME, large enterprise and public sector organisations that has led to significant growth of the business with a recurring annual turnover in excess of £25million in 2010.

Chris originally qualified as a chartered accountant and initially followed a career in the City, progressing into general management in both private and listed companies. He became CEO of a small, listed pet food manufacturing company and first joined the IT industry as Commercial Director of VAR Teksys. He later became UK Managing Director of distributor Magirus GmbH and Commercial Director of IT Partnerships. Chris joined Celerity in 2004 as Commercial Director and is responsible for the commercial aspects of the business (finance, purchasing and legal), supplier and vendor relationships and internal sales.

Paul Hunt started his career with Celerity in 2004 as a Business Development Manager. Paul's role was to understand the technologies that our clients and prospects were considering to assist with their business goals and to develop the Celerity portfolio to best serve these customers. Paul has spent the last seven years continuing to develop these strategies with a number of key clients and has assisted Celerity in growing revenues from £4.5M in 2004 to £24M in 2010. Paul has been promoted to the role of IBM Sales Director in recognition of his achievements to date.

Alan has been in the IT industry for over 30 years, working with NCR , Data General and IBM. Before joining Celerity Alan worked for 27 years at IBM as a client manager with customers such as VSEL, where he sold the project management systems for Trident, RSA where he outsourced the mainframes, DWP where he sold the STAP systems for the CSA/Employment Service and Benefits Agency and Barclays where he was responsible for selling the largest AIX order for IBM in Europe. For his last 12 years with IBM Alan was the Northern Sales Manager managing a team handling accounts such as Royal Bank of Scotland, Unilever and HSBC.

Darren has over 20 years experience in the IT industry, 8 years of this was spent as a software engineer working for BT where he supported Oracle based billing systems and developed solutions for BT Internet and BT Wireplay, (one of the first online gaming platforms). In 2000 he moved into the IBM hardware arena, working for a business partner as a technical consultant designing and implementing IBM AIX, storage and Oracle solutions. In 2002 he joined Celerity, as a technical consultant and in 2008 was promoted to Technical Manager. As well as managing the Professional Services element of Celerity, Darren also acts as a principal pre-sales and post-sales consultant delivering quality server, storage, virtualisation & software solutions.

Tracy has over 14 years marketing experience having initially started her career as a Marketing Administrator for an IBM Business partner based in the North East of England on a part-time basis whilst studying at University. Upon graduating she was promoted to Marketing Executive where she was responsible for the delivery of marketing campaign activity to generate new business for the field sales team.

Tracy left the IT industry for a few years to work in a sales and marketing management role developing and growing business for a Fire & Security company working primarily with public sector clients, specifically in the education sector.

In 2007 Tracy returned to the IT industry in her new role as Marketing Manager for Celerity, to help generate new business opportunities for the external business development team whilst improving commercial awareness of the organisation.