Olton Solutions Team
Research and Analysis Team
Olton’s team of highly proficient researchers and analysts led by John Anderson come from a wide variety of academic backgrounds. All have Honours degrees as a minimum and several with MA’s and MSC’s. We pride ourselves in the fact that our full-time employees have the ability to work fluently in all the worlds major languages, including; English, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, German and Hebrew.
Paul Manister, CEO email
Paul is the founder and CEO of Olton Limited.
Paul had a 22-year career in the Royal Navy as a deep specialist communications professional. His final role there was a two-year appointment as the lead National Intelligence Analyst for the UK’s global maritime communications effort, representing the country at the very highest levels of government. After leaving the Navy, Paul joined British Maritime Technologies where he supported the competitive bid for the contract to design and build two new Royal Navy aircraft carriers.
Chris Prosser, Principal email
Before joining Olton, Chris spent 25 years with the Ministry of Defence and has deep specialist knowledge of defence procurement processes and procedures. Chris was Olton Solution’s principal consultant to Siemens for Information Architecture and Systems at the Doha Asian Games. He is currently advising the Ministry of Defence in a £1.4 Billion programme for the acquisition of the next generation of Strike Fighter military aircraft.
Gavin Walker, Senior Client Manager email
Gavin Walker is a senior intelligence and security practitioner with extensive experience of the collection, exploitation and management of intelligence, advising to Ministerial level; a widely respected risk management consultant and innovative high-end problem solver, with a wealth of experience in providing front-end solutions to governmental and corporate level clients.
Gavin has recently completed a full-time MA in Intelligence and International Security, after over twenty years in the Intelligence Community and Royal Marines. Gavin brings a wealth of experience in providing and implementing front-end high level risk management advice as a team leader or team member. Gavin enjoys an extensive experience in consultancy and project management and has a broad, detailed experience of contingency planning and crisis management. He is Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute.
James Pendley, Managing Partner, Commercial
James manages the commercial side of the business of Olton. Prior to this he was the CEO of Serverside Group where he had overall responsibility for strategy, Sales & Marketing, P&L and the business units of Serverside, a global technology and application service provider to retail banks. Serverside supplies software and services to some 65 banks in 20 countries around the world from four offices (London, New York, Taipei and Auckland) with four hosting centres.
James primarily builds sales/commercial teams, sources new business and revenue opportunities and negotiates commercial arrangements (standard contracts, joint marketing arrangements, joint ventures, share purchase agreements, IPR). James joined Serverside from Reuters (LSE: RTR) where he was MD of Reuters Research Limited. Prior to this James played a key role in the acquisition of his employer Multex.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: MLTX), by Reuters. While at Multex, James was the MD of the Europe and Asian businesses and was responsible for certain international partnerships at board level including Reuters, Bloomberg, Telekurs and Dunn & Bradstreet. Prior to this, James has held positions at the Chancery and Commercial Bar of England & Wales, specialising in company and commercial litigation, and in investment banking (M&A) at KPMG in London.
Mark Calter, Operations Director – Bristol Office email
Mark joined the Royal Navy in 1979 as a Junior Seaman and finished his military career in 2007 as N2 (Commander) in the Royal New Zealand Navy.
Highlights of his prolific career, sunk on HMS ANTELOPE 1982, Devonport Field Gun Crew 1984/1987, HUMINT Ops NI 1988-1990, SPEC INT Ops (DIS) 1990-1992, Special Duties Officers’ Course BRNC 1995, Ships’ Int Manager HMS MARLBOUROUGH/HMS ARK ROYAL 1996-1998, J2 to CBFFI 1998, OIC Maritime INT Training Navy Maritime Intelligence Training Center, Norfolk Va, 1998 -1999, UK Exchange Officer (DIS) at the Office of Naval Intelligence, Washington DC 2000-2003, employed as the Operations Manager. Here he was awarded US Navy Commendation for strengthening the effectiveness of US / UK maritime/security forces’ activities through the provision of multi-source operational and strategic intelligence and security to support counter-drug, counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation (WMD) operations and through Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) the detection of illegal maritime shipments.
In 2003, he resigned from the Royal Navy and embarked on a further maritime intelligence career with the Royal New Zealand Navy, initially employed as the OIC of the Secure Intelligence Cell and the Maritime Intelligence Cell. Promoted to Commander and was N2 for RNZN, at the same time in NZ, he also ran a successful IT business.
Predominantly for family reasons, Mark has recently moved back to the UK on a permanent basis.
Nic Hann, ORA Project manager email
Nic is a specialist information security advisor. He holds an MSc in Information Security & Computer Crime, and received a distinction for his dissertation (written in 2004) exploring the vulnerabilities of communications networks in the City of London following a terrorist attack. Nic is Olton Solution’s advisor on terrorism issues, he worked in Washington DC as the all-source information fusion advisor to Dubai Ports World during their $6.8 Billion takeover of P&O. Nic prepared Olton Solution’s bid for the EU Preparatory Action Security Research Programme, designed to create a framework for a European intelligence analysis programme.
Recently he has been developing novel information gathering tools for Olton’s ORA intelligence suite of tools.
