The Blue Group

222 Spring Street

Carrollton, Georgia 30117

Consultants Profiles

Kirby Laye

Mr. Kirby Laye is senior network consultant with over 20 years experience providing network analysis, design and troubleshooting services to a wide variety of market verticals within the fortune 500. These business segments range from education, medical and legal to telecommunications and manufacturing. Kirby has been successful providing innovative solutions to a broad array of networking issues for both the public and private sectors. Mr. Laye earned his Associates of Arts degree from Andrew College and his Bachelors of Arts degree from Columbus State University.  He also holds both a Class II Unrestricted and a Low Voltage non-restricted electrical license as well as having completed the requirements for numerous industry certifications including; Novell’s Master Certified Novell Engineer (MCNE), Microsoft’s Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) and the Certified Network Expert (CNX).

Upon founding The Blue Group in 1995, Mr. Laye provided local area network (LAN) design, configuration and support services to several District Attorney offices throughout rural Georgia, the Carrollton City School district, BellSouth and Branch Banking and Trust’s online banking data center. Additionally, Mr. Laye was instrumental in upgrading and standardizing the local area networks in approximately forty-five manufacturing facilities located throughout the United States for Georgia Pacific Corporation as well as the network deployment within their East Coast Sales Center located in Marietta Georgia. Mr. laye also, designed and implemented new branch office networks for Buchanan Ingersol’s fifteen worldwide offices.

One of Kirby’s notable projects was the redesign of Bowater Paper’s Wide Area Network (WAN). Several months after completion, Bowater Paper estimated that this redesign effort saved them over $100,000 a month in telecommunication costs as well as improving the overall network reliabity and performance. Other projects include network upgrades at 180 branch offices for AM South Bank and the creation of a repair depot for the United States Army at Fort Benning, Georgia. This repair depot included an on-site service facility for computers, monitors, and printers, an end user help desk with ticket escalation procedures and a training center for field personnel. Mr. Laye also writes columns for two local newspapers The Community Connection and the Marietta Business Journal.

Before founding The Blue Group Mr. Laye spent 5 years as Manager of Information Systems at Aubrey Silvey Enterprises a large privately held corporation that owns construction, manufacturing, engineering, and service companies. Mr. Laye is very experienced in supporting complex multi-vendor network environments utilizing Token Ring, Ethernet, FDDI network topologies. He has over ten years experience installing, maintaining, and troubleshooting hardware and software from mainstream manufacturers such as; Cisco, Microsoft, Nortel, Hewlett Packard, Novell, Compaq, SUN, SCO, IBM and DELL.