Our Team

Guy Bates BSc (Hons)

A senior executive who has been a change agent within managed services and solutions to the education sector, delivering substantial, sustainable growth through innovation.

  • Established XMA as market leader in the school new-build ICT market with over 150 academy and free school project wins – value in excess of £100M
  • Fully managed services – value in excess of £14M, including 25 Guernsey schools
  • Aided the National College in its Strategic Leadership of ICT Programme; developing 14,000 head teachers
  • Supported the creation of Nottingham City IT Diploma programme

Between 2018 and 2020 Guy established XMA as a leading provider of TUPE-based outsourcing to improve schools’ use of ICT.

Guy led a major change management programme at XMA as Head of Sales, enabling XMA to transition from product supply to Managed Service Provider.

XMA main Board member 2004 – 2006 inclusive.

Doubled XMA’s Direct Sales Division turnover in four years.

Creator of XMA’s school enrichment programme.

STEM Ambassador: helping to enrich Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths activities in schools through industry engagement with students and student projects. Raising the profile of STEM careers.

Since 2005 Guy has worked with leading scientists, children’s writers, performing arts groups, astronauts, elite athletes and business leaders to engage, coach and inspire young people.

Peter Heath

A senior executive with over 35 years’ experience in the IT industry. Peter is an engineer by trade who became a business owner in the early 90s. After 10 successful years growing the MSP from start up to £8m turnover, the business was acquired by Westcoast in 2002 and Peter became the Technical Director of the new entity.

For the past 18 years Peter has held senior executive positions within the Westcoast Group including Group CIO, and CTO for XMA. During this time, the group has grown from £250m turnover to £3b turnover in 2020. A veteran of over 10 major acquisitions, Peter has a proven track record in delivering transformation and business growth to organisations of all sizes.

Dr Clive Foster

Clive is both cloud evangelist and practical implementation expert. Innovation is his passion and his outstanding technical capability enables him to plan and implement transformation of IT services, their manageability, and user experience.

Clive has led numerous multi academy trust IT transformation projects, resulting in more scalable, functional and reliable IT services for every user group.

Chris Barber MA, BSc (Hons)

Since 1998 Chris has worked with educational institutions across the world to instil the NASA ‘you can do it’ spirit. Since those early days, Chris has worked with Space Centres, businesses, universities, schools and communities in the UK, USA, Norway, India, Mongolia, China, the Arctic and Australia.

Chris founded Mission Discovery ™, where participants work in teams with astronauts, NASA leaders and world-renowned scientists. This programme includes NASA leadership and team building, scientifically and technologically creativity and improving presentation skills. At the end of the programme the teams present their ideas for a space experiment, the best of which is constructed, launched and carried out on the International Space Station by astronauts as they orbit the earth. To date Chris’ team has sent over thirty experiments to the ISS.

Recently he has developed a range of astronaut led team and leadership programmes for business, the public sector and management. These include workshops and simulations based on NASA preparations for incidents in space.

Chris has an outstanding record of school leadership and transformation. In his last school he was instrumental in taking the school from below average to be the top comprehensive in England and Wales at A level.

Mr. Subrata Mukherjee

Subrata is a bachelor of technology with 20 years’ experience in the software industry. Subrata combines strong software architecture, technical leadership, analysis and design skills with a background that includes complex systems integration, bespoke software development, and enterprise package customisation and deployment. During his career he has taken architecture, analysis, design and development roles on projects and programmes in the finance, retail, government and manufacturing sectors. His systems development experience ranges from small systems for specialised users, up to very large corporate applications for financial institutions, high-street retailers and government departments.