The KawaConnect team

KawaConnect is a small team. When you call us, you talk to one of the people below, and the person who plans your project is the one who builds it.

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Dean Thomas

Owner and founder, Coraopolis, Pennsylvania

Dean has more than twelve years of hands-on IT experience. He started KawaConnect in 2024, sets the direction of the company, designs the infrastructure we build for clients, and still does a large share of the hands-on work: Linux servers, Proxmox and Ceph clusters, Kubernetes, firewalls and Microsoft 365.

Before KawaConnect he was a systems administrator at De Nora, running file servers, VMware vSphere, Active Directory and VPNs for the site, along with security audits. Earlier he was IT security coordinator for a cannabis MSO, where he looked after camera systems, network setup and security audits as new stores opened.

He prefers open-source tools where they do the job, and he likes connecting them cleanly to the Microsoft systems most businesses already rely on.

Dean on LinkedIn

Romeo M. Ababneh

Lead solutions architect, Irbid, Jordan

Romeo is KawaConnect's lead solutions architect. He designs how client workloads run in the cloud: applications and sites on Microsoft Azure, containers on our Kubernetes clusters, and the backups, monitoring and access control around them. He has been with KawaConnect since 2024.

Romeo holds a master's degree in network engineering and security from Jordan University of Science and Technology and a bachelor's degree in computer science from Al-Balqa Applied University. That training in networking and security carries into his cloud designs, where network layout, encryption and access control are planned from the start.

He also leads our WordPress work, building, updating and maintaining the sites we host, and he handles much of our remote support and maintenance. Our websites page shows the kind of work he leads. He works from Irbid, where KawaConnect supports staff and systems on site through our Irbid service area.

Romeo on LinkedIn

Alana Oliveira

Agentic developer, Salvador, Brazil

Alana builds KawaConnect's agentic software: tools in which AI models carry out multi-step tasks, connected to the systems our clients already use, together with the web interfaces people use to work with them. It is the hands-on side of our AI and automation service.

She comes to the role from front-end and full-stack development, working in React, Next.js, TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js and Tailwind CSS, with SQL, PHP and Git alongside. Her earlier projects covered sign-in and authentication, form validation, accessibility and responsive layouts, and connecting interfaces to Node.js, Firebase and MySQL back ends.

Alana holds a bachelor's degree in science and technology from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). She works from Salvador, Brazil, in Portuguese and English.

Alana on LinkedIn

Luiz Paulo Mesquita

Physical security auditor, Salvador, Brazil

Luiz Paulo is KawaConnect's physical security auditor. He checks that the camera systems and other physical security we manage are working and in good condition: every camera recording, footage easy to find and view when someone needs it, and faults caught before anyone goes looking for a recording that is not there.

He works much like a security operations center for the sites we look after, keeping watch over the systems across our partners' locations and flagging anything that needs a technician on site. It is the day-to-day side of our CCTV and security camera service.

Luiz Paulo works from Salvador, Brazil.

Luiz Paulo on LinkedIn

How we work together

Dean works from western Pennsylvania, Romeo from Jordan, and Alana and Luiz Paulo from Brazil. Most projects have more than one of us on them. Dean leads the infrastructure, networks and on-site work in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and stays involved in every client relationship. Romeo leads our cloud architecture and WordPress sites, along with much of the remote support and maintenance. Alana builds the agentic tools and automations behind our AI work. Luiz Paulo keeps watch over the cameras and physical security we manage. Between us, a client always has someone who knows their systems.

Work with us

Tell us what you run and what is not working. You will hear back from one of us, not a call center.

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