Every member of the Mirago team has fundamentally contributed to the development of the company. We cannot of course provide the background of all of them, but here are three of the senior executives who were with Mirago from the early days.

Stephen Holmes - Chief Executive

Stephen was formerly the MD of Compsoft where he established the original project with Derek Preston and launched Mirago as a separate entity. He has combined a strong commercial background with a technical skill set to develop the business processes of the emerging company and lead them through the round of fundraising to a sustained period of organic growth.

He originally started his career in the marine electronics industry. Before that however, he admits to being part of a near extinct breed who programmed in Fortran at University. In the 80s he established Cellcall, one of the first UK cellular service providers. After introduction of investment capital by a consortium, this company ultimately became Peoples Phone one of the boom companies of the early 90s. He continued his association with Peoples Phone until he became MD of Compsoft after acquiring the company as lead investor in a consortium.

Among other interests he is still the Chairman of Compsoft, but his abiding day to day passion remains the continued development of Mirago. What's so compelling about Mirago? "...well you don't get many opportunities to go into uncharted territory in an entirely new sector".

Derek Preston - Chief Technology Officer

Derek was a founder member of the Mirago team and is in charge of steering Mirago's research and development strategy. As Chief Technology Officer he is responsible for the indexing, search and advertising systems used by Mirago. Prior to Mirago, he led the project to develop Compsoft's flagship client server relational database products. His experience ranges from Assembler to C++ and spans two decades of developing data analysis and data management software.

Colleagues recollect hearing Derek say in 1996 "...what I would find really interesting is to get the chance to manipulate huge amounts of data...". Well, he certainly got his wish. Today he tends to spend his time crunching data on Terabyte servers, whilst discussing the intricacies of the search algorithms and the latest attempts to spam the index. Bliss!

Derek also tends to be the public face of Mirago at the various Search Engine conferences and SEO meetings. If you meet him at one of those events, he will happily talk to you for hours about the pleasures of indexing "...huge amounts of data...".

Outside of work, Derek's interests include coral reef and wreck diving with family who live in Bermuda and cross country cycling in the UK. At weekends in the summer he can be found cooking a barbeque for family and friends, together with Pimm's No 1... of course!

Philippe Preget - Head of Operations

After graduating as a software engineer specialising in computer vision and image processing, Philippe started his career as a consultant working for one of the European Directorate General Agencies based in the south of England. He subsequently joined Compsoft plc to build its European arm and its consultancy division. He was a founder member of Mirago plc where his first role was to plan and implement a robust network system and server architecture.

At home, Philippe is keen on diy and tinkering with computers. At work, Philippe is keen on building server rooms and he tinkers with computers on a major scale... a strange coincidence.

He is responsible for making sure everything runs smoothly with all the critical servers and processes. He has designed and implemented monitoring tools to help his team perform that role on a 24/7 basis and ensure that continuity of service is maintained for Mirago's users and Search Partners.

You may see him at Search Engine conferences in France, as he has a particular interest in ensuring that the Mirago index has good penetration in his native market.

You can contact us for more information via: corporate@mirago.com