Niel B. Harris
Sr. Director, Hosting Services
Apollo Group

Niel Harris has over 30 years of IT experience with companies such as EDS, Federal Reserve Bank, Manufacturers Hanover Trust/Chemical/Chase Bank and most recently DHL.  Niel was the founder and Managing Director of Harwel Technologies providing a full range of technology services to government, private and non-profit sectors.  He has a BS/Computer Science degree from City University of NY and a Masters degree from NYU’s Stern School of Business.
 
In his numerous roles, Niel has been responsible for all aspects of leadership across IT disciplines: Applications Development, Systems Integration, Infrastructure, Engineering and Data Center Operations within the corporate sector and as an entrepreneur.  He has extensive experience leading teams through mergers and acquisitions, as well as building high performing teams within several enterprise organizations.
 
In Niel’s present role with Apollo Group he  has end to end accountability for Servers (physical and virtual), Client Computing, Database and Storage technologies within the ITS organization.  He is responsible for driving standardization across each platform, improving deployment cycles, getting all platforms to current and supported software and hardware levels and optimizing infrastructure IT costs.
 
On a personal note, Niel is the father of two sons 33 and 23, one daughter 30 and a daughter-law.  Niel’s favorite activities are: listening to music (especially jazz), cooking/baking and spending time with his family.  He enjoys playing basketball, hiking, cycling and attending cultural and sports events.