Meet The Team

Simon Hayward
Managing Director

A founder of the company, Simon’s day to day role is in sales and account management. With over 20 years of experience in management and leadership positions, Simon has provided B2B services to organisations of all sizes.

Simon is passionate about providing solutions that make a real difference to our customers. Simon has an extensive background in managed services, end to end solution design, installation and support.

Neon Islam
Technical Lead

A founder of the company, Neon’s day-to-day role is to lead our technical services and ensure that our customers get the right solutions. With over 12 years of experience in the field of network and sales engineering, Neon is one of Australia’s highest-qualified Aruba engineers.

Neon has worked across multiple large-scale projects in various industries and is passionate about building trusted relationships with customers and business stakeholders to clearly understand their needs and exceed their expectations.

Sankeerthana Gopikrishna
Project Manager

With over 15 years of experience in both IT and non-IT sectors, Sankeerthana serves as a seasoned Project Manager overseeing end-to-end project plans, programs, and delivery.

Sankeerthana is responsible for managing project timelines and hours, maintaining records in the CRM, and providing weekly status updates to the Director. Additionally, she handles scheduling tasks, coordinating services and project delivery, and acting as a liaison between the team and social media marketing.

Chris Heywood
Senior Network Engineer

Chris is one of Affinity Blue’s Senior Network Engineers.
He has supported Crown Resorts’ network for more than a decade.

Chris works closely with customers and business stakeholders to design complex, high-quality network solutions.
Chris also holds multiple Aruba and Cisco certifications. He has worked on some of the largest campus and enterprise networks in Australia, with security and resilience at the forefront of his design philosophy.

Joshua Te Momo
Junior Network Engineer

Joshua graduated from the Melbourne Institute of Technology (MIT), with a Bachelor of Networking (Majoring in Cyber Security) in 2022

As a Network Engineer of Affinity Blue, he is responsible for the monitoring and management of a network. Conducting any troubleshooting, configuring, connecting, updating, and auditing, if required for a project/site’s network.

Tharun Kumar S.
Junior Network Engineer

Tharun has a background in Computer Science Engineering and experience in telecommunications, network testing, and automation. Prior to joining Affinity Blue, he worked at Nokia on broadband network testing, ONT validation, and automated testing.

At Affinity Blue, Tharun supports enterprise networking projects, specialising in the staging and configuration of network switches, wireless access points, and cloud-managed networking solutions. He is currently pursuing a Master of Engineering Management at RMIT University, with a keen interest in network engineering, automation, and technology-driven solutions.

Mae Corpuz
Project Manager

With over 10 years of experience in IT project management, Mae specialises in enterprise network infrastructure, cybersecurity, cloud solutions, and technology transformation. Her expertise spans end-to-end project delivery, infrastructure modernisation, strategic planning, risk management, and stakeholder engagement. Prior to joining Affinity Blue, she led complex technology initiatives at Aurecon, delivering large-scale infrastructure and network transformation projects across multiple regions.

At Affinity Blue, she is committed to delivering technology solutions, creating positive client experiences, and building strong, lasting relationships through trust, collaboration, and a shared commitment to excellence.

Kenneth Lee
Network Engineer

With 20 years of Networking experience, Kenneth has proven his talents Managing Multi-Vendor large scale Networks. As well as his Networking expertise, Kenneth has advanced skills in Cyber Security and IoT Solutions.

Kenneth’s strong history of experience makes him a leader in project management and sales.

Kenneth, also provides different point of views to his customers during the initial project stages, which provides great value in the design

James Bretherton
Senior Network Engineer

With over 30 years in the field of networking, James brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to the team. He has worked for integrators and vendors including 3Com, Network Solutions, GEC, Hewlett Packard and Aruba, and holds tertiary qualifications in Electrical Engineering, Technology and Business Management.

James has a keen interest in client business requirements and works with organisations to ensure all solutions meet and exceed expectations. James holds a number of certifications with Aruba and Arista and is constantly expanding his knowledge, particularly in the LAN, WLAN, SD-WAN and network management fields.

Rory Bell
Senior Account Manager

Rory joins Affinity Blue with 5 years of enterprise vendor and channel partner management experience across EMEA and ANZ.

Most recently, he served as National Business Manager for Arrow Electronics’ HPE Aruba Networking division, working closely with partners to transform their Managed Services go-to-market strategy.

He carries this experience to Affinity Blue, working closely with Affinity Blue’s customers, and on behalf of trusted channel partners, to deliver best in breed Managed Network Services across ANZ..

Lucky Falcon
NOC Engineer

Lucky is a NOC Engineer with more than 9 years of experience in network troubleshooting, performance optimisation, and client support across LAN, WAN, IPT, wireless, and security infrastructure. As part of the pioneer NOC support team in Manila for Affinity Blue, he leads the resolution of service requests and incidents, whether they come from proactive monitoring alerts or from customers, with a focus on speed, accuracy, and service reliability.

Beyond his core NOC responsibilities, Lucky also supports the AB Engineering team on ongoing projects, helping lighten their workload and accelerate delivery.

Jonald Tamayo
NOC Engineer

A computer engineer by profession, Jonald holds industry network certifications and has more than seven years of experience in network operations, supporting multi-vendor environments for clients across the United States and Australia.

His IT career began in 2014 in in-house helpdesk support, then moved through security, network and systems administration roles. Today he focuses on monitoring, troubleshooting and managing networks, while building his expertise in SD-WAN, wireless and LAN technologies.

Elle Quan
Sales Operations & Support

Elle bridges the gap between supply chain resilience and product quality. With a strong foundation in end-to-end sales operations, supply chain management and product quality engineering, she turns complex, multi-tiered operational bottlenecks into streamlined, predictable processes that support growth.

Whether she is reducing lead times, stabilising quality or scaling order-to-cash workflows, Elle’s approach is rooted in data-driven problem solving and Lean Six Sigma methods.

Pete Fraser
Strategic Account Executive - SASE & SSE

Pete Fraser leads Affinity Blue’s secure networking practice on Cato Networks. He has spent twenty years in cyber security. He started as a network engineer, then spent eight years as a Senior Sales Engineer at WatchGuard and four and a half at CrowdStrike, where he led the managed and professional services sales team across Asia Pacific.

That role had him working closely on some of the largest breaches in the region, which gave him a first-hand view of how attacks really happen and what it takes to recover. Today he works with Australian organisations to bring their sites, remote staff and cloud under one secure network.