Bob served eight years in the US Navy, ending in 1997. The last four of which were spent working at the White House for the White House Communication Agency, where he served as the systems administrator responsible for its mainframe communications system and as a lead for vice presidential travel. Bob went on to work for a number of different government agencies as a consultant, including the NRO, DIA, OPM, and JWAC, with a specialty in desktop management and deployment. During this time, Bob created AppDeploy to share tips on application deployment and scripting.

The success of AppDeploy opened up opportunities for Bob to speak and write, starting with a book on the KiXtart scripting language and speaking engagements at user groups and conferences; he went on to write a book on Desktop Administration and a series of papers for Wise and InstallShield.

In 2004 he established iTripoli, Inc with friend Steve Behrns. They created the KiXscripts Editor, which went on to become the award-winning (now discontinued) Admin Script Editor.

Bob took on the operation of another community for Realtime Publishing on the topic of Windows Vista and co-authored a book on Vista Deployment for Wiley. Unfortunately, Vista turned out to be a bad place to invest expertise 😉 Bob still presents at some industry events but is no longer working on any writing projects.

Bob worked on AppDeploy as an after-hours project until it was acquired by KACE in 2007, which was then acquired by Dell in 2009. Bob then served as product owner for the development of a new community platform which replaced AppDeploy as ITNinja.

Bob left Dell after serving as director of product management for the KACE management appliances. In 2017, he went on to lead Product for Flexera’s security and application readiness products, including Software Vulnerability Manager and AdminStudio.