Our team

Originally from South Africa, Alan spent a long time away from his country of birth, travelling extensively and learning about different peoples and cultures. Alan’s experience in the IT industry started more than 30 years ago, but had a necessary break for a few years in between. He was also the first South African to be employed by Juniper Networks, which after working at the biggest ISP on the planet at the time UUNET provided the opportunity to really see and understand how the biggest networks on the planet are designed.

As an early starter at Juniper, he has had the opportunity to become both JNCIE-SP #24 as well as JNCIE-ENT #9. During his career at Juniper Networks Alan has had the pleasure of sharing much of this knowledge with hundreds of students and also to verify their understanding as the primary EMEA based Certification proctor for the JUNOS Professional and Expert Lab exams. From the business perspective Alan has gained the experience of two previous partnerships, which provided the opportunity for him to realise and decide that the kind of an organization he wished to be involved in did not seem to exist, so therefore the logical next step was to create it – the result is Twine Networks. Alan’s first language is English, but is also fluent in Dutch.

Alan has always been drawn to eastern philosophies and practised the Chinese internal martial arts under a Chinese master and friend, and this interest influences the twine networks company philosophy.

Richard Pracko comes from the heart of the Europe, from a small but beautiful country – Slovakia. Right after finishing his studies at the university with telecommunications as a major, he joined the Siemens Networking department, and focused on the integration of Juniper Networks and Siemens products. There, he gathered a lot of experience and skills in the networking area by taking an active part to numerous projects, and this , all over the world. It was during that time that his teaching career started. In the beginning of 2009, he left Siemens on his own initiative, and joined Twine Networks to face new challenges in his professional life, in the areas of consulting and technical education, over a vast geographic area (EMEA and more).

Richard is an energetic young man, with interests ranging across numerous sport disciplines like tennis, soccer, skiing and others which give him the joy and opportunity to spend his physical energy and exhaust the stress accumulated at work, in a very healthy way.

Richard speaks English, German, Czech and Slovak.

Alexey was born in Moscow in country  that does not exist any more. Currently he is citezen of Russian Federation. He speaks Russian and English.

Alexey started his carrier in telecommunication area in 1995 as a technician in S.W.I.F.T. Access Point.

Since that time he gained experience as a field, technical support and systems engineer, project manager, technical writer and instructor.
He had taken part in many projects for corporate clients and service providers, participated in the creation of networks based on X.25, Frame Relay, ATM, PDH/SDH, TCP/IP and VoIP technologies, learned and implemented solutions from Motorola, Nortel Networks, Tellabs.

His position in Twine Networks is consulting engineer and instructor .

Alexey becomes energized and determined to stimulate people to move, grow and develop to higher levels of personal effectiveness.

He believes that the knowledge and experience as well with spring water – the more of it to draw, the more water at the source and the purer the water in it.

Maxim Frolov:

• Born in Moscow, Russia on 25/12/1972 and have been living in Moscow ever since

• Graduated in a secondary school, then in Moscow Aviation Institute
• Started networking career in 1999 after leaving compulsary military service

• Married and have got 3 kids, now lead quiet and comfortable life with my family
• When not working prefer sea, sun and nature, silence and tranquility, love travelling
• Interested in popular sciences, especially natural sciences and history

Sylvain spent the last six  years working for different systems integrators  across  the globe in order to implement networking/security solutions and provide technical trainings. His playground has often been the installation of firewalls , SSL ,  IDP devices in banking and ISP environments but also the deployment  of L2 / L3 gears in small and medium enterprises. His close collaboration with Juniper gave him the opportunity to be involved in many POC (Proof Of Concept projects) and seminars but also to be part of the beta tester program.

He has  always been very enthusiast and passionate about the networking space and all the aspects & challenges of this industry ever since he  completed his studies in  telecom.

Today, Sylvain lives in France and provides technical trainings and professional services in French and English over  the whole EMEA area. Sylvain  considers himself  as a “backpacker” after the office hours : ranging from the “overland track” in Tasmania to  a road trip in northern Canada, he always has new adventures and challenges in mind.

Michal Vydareny comes from Slovakia, where he grew up and lives now. He graduated at the Slovak University of Technology where he obtained a the  Master of Science degree. Since that time he worked for Siemens company,  where he took part to many Juniper oriented projects all around the world, mainly with the SDX and SRC products.

Four years with Siemens led him to work also with the Accounting and Rating engine, and as an integrator with Siemens IPTV solution. This helped him  gather a lot of valuable experience in solutions, technologies, and also communication with customers. He has a solid experience of on-site integration work.

He speaks Slovak and English.
He has a passion for travelling, discovering new cultures and tasting traditional food. This is calling him repetitively back to travel.

Ryan Luke Gravett was born in South Africa and moved to The Netherlands when he was 9 years old. After spending several years working for the TNT in Amsterdam he joined Twine Networks after being encouraged to make a career change by his father Alan, who felt he would be an asset to the company considering his years of experience assembling and setting up his own computer systems at home.
After a few months of reading about TCP/IP and watching the ICND1&2 DVD tutorials Ryan started following various courses at the Twine training centre in Johannesburg.

He gradually built up the experience needed to take responsibility for the Twine Networks  equipment in both the Johannesburg and Amsterdam labs, preparing racks for instructors and clients, also providing support where needed. He is also responsible for keeping the equipment documentation up to date and assists in providing documentation for courseware development as well.
Currently Ryan has immersed himself in studying Ethical Hacking and hopes to become a Certified Penetration Testing Engineer in the near future.
Ryan’s  passion is freerunning and he also loves playing the piano.

Jean-Loup Gélard started in the computer industry some 30 years ago, by developing X25 Software for Texas Instruments, right out of his Master in Computer Science from the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA-Rennes-France) in 1980. He then took part to the  exciting adventure of Artificial Intelligence, and Knowledge Engineering,  where T.I. became a world leader in the late 80’s. That’s where he discovered the Art of Teaching, and grew an interest for the nature of knowledge, that never left him ever since . After a brief return to development,  as a software project manager for a partner of the European Space Agency, Jean-Loup met the world of the Internet, in 1995, with Bay Networks, as a full time technical Instructor.

He also worked as a network administrator and a network reference architect for LAN and Campus designs within Nortel Networks. Certified at various levels by Cisco, and Juniper Networks, Jean-Loup enjoys nothing more than sharing fun and knowledge at the same time, in French and English, which he also does at the University of Nice.

His combined interests for oriental philosophies and trekking led him to dusty trails and Tibetan monasteries on the slopes of Himalaya more than once.

Nuno, based in Portugal, started his career by gaining extensive hands-on experience with Siemens as a Network Engineer specializing in IP and xDSL network design and implementation. In parallel with his engineering work, Nuno took responsibility for delivering internal training in a range of broadband protocols (ATM, Frame Relay, IP).In 2000 he moved full-time into education services as Training Manager at the Unisphere Networks Training Center in EMEA, and became one of the first Unisphere (now Juniper) Certified Technical Instructors qualified outside the US. In this position he directed a team that delivered education services to all Juniper’s major clients in EMEA (Deutch Telekom, France Telecom, British Telecom, Telia, Colt, etc.) and developed the center and its curriculum to become a fully qualified Juniper Networks Authorised Education Center (JNAEC). Languages: Portuguese, Spanish, English, French and Italian

Originating from the small town of Bryansk (350 km from Russia’s capital Moscow)
where he grew up and lived for almost 25 years, Alexey started to take interest in IT at 16, after his father had bought him a computer. Soon he discovered the world of UNIX and started to self-study hard his favourite FreeBSD OS and got a system administrator job in local ISP just after he’d graduated from the university.
After several years on this position where he obtained a lot of experience with production systems based on FreeBSD and Cisco, he moved to Moscow with his wife.
Constantly interested in something new to study he soon became familiar with JunOS.
Started from the engineering position, Alexey moved to TAC manager function in the big Russian systems integrator, which is specializing on building and supporting national ISP’s networks. During these years he obtained triple CCIE and JNCIE-M/T certifications. Also Alexey is a certified instructor for teaching Juniper and Cisco courses.

Among the large number of his interests are playing ice hockey, football and drilling exercises on the bar. Also he reads a lot, especially about healthy lifestyle, and has a passion to tune and style two of his family’s favourite cars, Toyota Celicas T20 and T23 with autoclub mates.

Willy Schoots has been teaching networking technologies for the last 10 years.
Before becoming an instructor he worked as a systems engineer and as a network engineer for multiple international companies.

He teaches both Cisco and Juniper courses at all levels. He is both CCIE and JNCIE certified, and also holds other certifications (CISSP, CWNP etc).
He lives near Amsterdam in the Netherlands with his wife and extended cat family. He can deliver courses in English and Dutch.

When  not teaching networking classes he loves to spend his time doing wildlife and landscape photography.

After  working as a designer in the fashion industry for almost ten years, Angelic went traveling into Asia and became inspired by it’s cultures and philosophies, and by it’s ways of approaching health and disease. She went on to study Chinese Medicine and immersed herself in qigong, tao yin, yoga and meditation under a number of different teachers.

To experience life’s energy and the wisdom of these practices in the challenges of everyday life is the essence of her work as a trainer.
Within twine, Angelic guards the expression and consciousness of the company’s profile as well as its social engagement and responsibility.

Angelic is Alan Gravetts partner and mother of Samira, living in Holland and South Africa.

Joy is the ‘twine mascot’ and he performs with his boss Samira in “The fantastic Joy show”. He can do sit, down, roll-over, give his paw, and stay and go. He’s got his own agility place in the backyard of twine’s premises.
Joy is a black Labrador Retriever, with a white mark on his chest, and he always follows his boss’s commands.
Joy has befriended several of the instructors. He guards the entrance of twine networks training center in Johannesburg and he welcomes the students on arrival (and their cars, especially the wheels).