Linux Training Materials - About GBdirect

GBdirect was formed in 1995, by Mike Banahan and Andy Rutter, following nearly twenty years collaborative work on the commercial application of information technologies at the higher levels of organisations like Barclay's Bank, DHL, the U.S. Department of Defense, The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Shell, B.P. and British Telecom.

The initial focus of the company was predominantly high-quality consultancy on internet/intranet and ecommerce-related matters.

Practical experience in those fields, however, led the company to increasingly choose open source software solutions to real-world problems and led its users to turn to us for their corporate training needs.

Although this experience provided the commercial impetus for us to become Europe's leading specialists in Linux training, it would never have happened had we not already possessed a strong skills base in UNIX-related training and development.

In that respect, there are few people with better pedigrees than that of our Managing Director, Mike Banahan. Back in the Jurassic period (the 1980s), Mike was one of the people who wrote the original UNIX portability standards for the X/Open Foundation, i.e. the definitions of what a true UNIX system should be. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s Mike also headed what were, successively, the UK market leaders in UNIX training: The Instruction Set and Hoskyns Open Systems Division.

Our Linux training and development experience does not, however, stop at Mike. Our head office network is entirely Linux-based. All of our technical staff, and most of their non-technical colleagues, have years of Linux experience as end-users and as administrators (several were amongst the very first users of the OS). We require all of our trainers to have real-world experience of Linux development and system administration before they teach, and we require all of our developers to do regular training stints as part of the normal quality assurance process.

This self-discipline provides the foundation for a business which puts quality and comprehensive value for money ahead of short-term expediency.

We have chosen to use open source software, because the no-secrets approach imposes a comparable discipline on its developers, not because it is cheap. To encourage this way of working, we have set ourselves the goal of releasing all of our existing training materials under an open source licence as soon as we practically can.

Details on our public Linux training courses and our in-house corporate Linux training can be accessed via the Courses menu item.

Details on our consultancy and non-Linux-related training courses are available at the GBdirect site.