About Open Smart
Thirty years of making technology work for people
Open Smart is Michael Fas, a Computer Engineer in Cambridge. When you call, you get me. Not a call centre, not a rota of engineers who have never seen your office.
Michael Fas
Computer Engineer, Cambridge. IT support, consulting, training, websites and digital marketing.
How I got here
I am a Computer Engineer with more than three decades of hands on experience across IT support, infrastructure, network security and WordPress development. In that time I have delivered IT operations and digital transformation work for over a hundred clients across the UK, from small businesses to schools and community organisations.
My career started in the earliest days of public internet access. I founded one of the first fifty internet cafes registered anywhere in the world, on the island of Samos in Greece, and worked directly with Microsoft during the NetMeeting era. That was a period when getting two computers to talk to each other reliably was genuinely difficult, and it taught me habits I still use.
Today I run Open Smart from Cambridge, looking after IT support, consulting, training, cybersecurity and WordPress hosting for businesses across Cambridgeshire.
I speak English, Greek and Romanian, which occasionally turns out to be more useful than any certificate.
How I work
Reliability first
I design and maintain systems for uptime and resilience rather than for whatever is quickest to set up. If the same thing breaks three times, something underneath it is wrong and patching it a fourth time is not doing you a service.
Security by default
Layered defences, GDPR compliance and staff awareness built into the work from the start, not bolted on after an incident or a week before an insurance renewal.
Plain English
I translate technical decisions into clear business terms so you understand the risk, the cost and the trade off. You should be able to repeat my explanation to someone else and have it still make sense.
No pressure to spend
I sell my time, not hardware or licences, so I have nothing to gain from telling you to replace a system that has three good years left in it. If the honest answer is to change nothing this year, that is what you will hear.
Background
| Post Graduate Specialisation Robotics and Telecommunications University Polytechnic of Bucharest, Automatica and Calculatoare |
1988 to 1992 |
| M.Eng Computer Engineering and Information University of Patras, Greece |
1983 to 1988 |
Recognition
DATANETWORK Magazine, March 1992. Written up under the headline “Fas Michail breaks communications borders” for building a wide area network before the word intranet existed, after a visiting MIT researcher took an interest in it.
Cambridgeshire Chamber of Commerce. Panellist on Preparing for AI: Skills, Jobs, Learning and Development.
Selected work
A few of the businesses I have worked with. Real sites, running now.
Interested in working together?
Call 07706 601114, or send a message and you will hear back the same working day.