About
Ian Horne
Technology leadership for situations that aren't working.
Global experience across education, enterprise SaaS, PE-backed businesses, and large-scale M&A. The pattern is the same: something has stalled, confidence is low, and the path forward isn't clear. I come in, find the constraint, and lead the work to get things moving again.
I work hands-on with AI: production LLM deployments, agentic architectures, MCP integrations, and governance frameworks. I open-source the methodology — Gatekeep and LoopForge are live on GitHub.
Available for permanent CTO/CIO roles, fractional engagements, and transformation advisory. UK and international.
Track record
- CTO, Kaplan International — global education, ~$40m IT OPEX, 14 business units, Americas/EMEA/APAC. Turnaround of £300m division in 5 months. Production AI, ISO 27001:2022, enterprise vendor management (~20% opex reduction). 24 M&A transactions.
- Head of Infrastructure, SHL — PE-backed, $400m divestiture from Gartner. Full technology separation across infrastructure, identity, and applications. Delivered on timeline with zero service disruption.
- Director, Infrastructure, Gartner / CEB — global SaaS platforms supporting ~$1b revenue. Established AWS Cloud Centre of Excellence. DevOps, automation, unified security and compliance governance. Through acquisition and integration cycles.
- Earlier — Raytheon (federal secure hosting, FISMA/NIST), INS/Lucent (carrier-grade networks, OC-192 deployments), Galileo/Travelport (airline reservation systems). 1996-2012.