Darren Boyce CEO
With an early career in excavation machinery, or JCB driving to you and me, Darren took an interest in the IT industry at a young age. His first job required him to sit in a tiny room, looking at the wall, with a telephone and a terminal, trying to sell Cabletron to Scotland. He did this for no wages, for 3 months, in an attempt to get a foot in the door of the IT industry.
A number of years on and Darren has taken over the helm of the merged companies of Unified Networks and Applinet, to form Proximity Communications. He’s focussed on providing high level services via his committed team and values hard work and sheer determination above everything else.
Married with 4 sons, he’s also a grandfather. Darren plays golf in his spare time, a slightly more sedate past time, since giving up Motorcross Racing a few years ago following a crash.
Roberto Casula Chief Technical Officer
A techie from way back, Roberto began programming in BBC BASIC and Assembler at the tender age of 10. His first commercially successful program was written for his Primary School and he was given three C90 cassettes as payment!
With a degree in Mathematics from the University of London, Roberto became a fully fledged IT industry employee when he joined the IBM Personal Software Assist support group, working with a direct customer base, primarily made up of large UK and global organisations.
Leaving IBM in 1997 Roberto joined a systems integrator. In this role he combined software development and platform rollouts with the creation of a feature-rich email security system for Lotus Domino.
In 1999 Roberto joined – at its inception – what has now become Proximity Communications. He was instrumental in a number of software and application development programmes. As the company evolved to embrace network infrastructure solutions and later IP Telephony, Roberto’s role continued to develop.
In 2005 Roberto became Technical Director and continued to be very ‘hands on’ within the team, trialling and introducing new products and technologies for the benefit of customers.
Roberto has just recently been promoted to Chief Technical Officer (CTO) within the company for all his dedication and hard work he has shown over the years. The board felt it was time to combine both the engineering team and technical Solutions Group under one Director within the company.
Roberto is married with two children and plays the guitar and piano in his spare time.
Stuart Legg Sales and Marketing Director
Stuart joined Proximity Communications at the start of 2011 having previously been the Sales Director of Datapulse PLC, a supplier of Applications software for Avaya. Stuart was responsible for the firm’s sales teams across Europe and helped secure some of Datapulse’s largest customer’s and channels.
More recently at Datapulse Stuart was part of the senior management team that sold the business to Enghouse systems and took on responsibility for integrating and managing the Syntellect sales team with Datapulse.
Outside of work Stuart is married with two children and enjoys watching and playing a variety of sports.
Peter Francis Chief Finance Officer
Peter Francis joined the team at Proximity recently, as Chief Finance Officer. He’s an extremely experienced CFO with a background in working with successful SME technology companies both within the UK market, and globally in the US and across EMEA. In addition to the remit of financial direction and management of these businesses Peter has had strong front office experience and has consistently added value to both the sales and delivery functions.
Peter was educated at Liverpool University and achieved his ACA accreditation with Arthur Andersens where he remained for 7 years, managing a team of 10 people. Other businesses that Peter has worked with include Fourth Shift Group as European Finance Director, SoftBrands Europe Limited as EMEA Finance Director and CFO Distribution Technology as the Chief Finance Officer.
Darren Boyce, CEO said: “I’m really pleased that we’ve been fortunate enough to encourage Peter Francis to join Proximity, who is really enthusiastic about our business and who I truly think will add a unique and complimentary perspective to the company. “
Peter said: “This is a great move for me as I can see where I can contribute to the development of operations at Proximity, and I can also see this is a company with a pretty bright future!”
