Formed in 1999, zOpium is based in Surrey, UK. It is owned and managed by Kevin McKeown who is also a state registered paramedic working as a motorcycle rapid responder, also in Surrey.

Kevin has worked in the IT business for over 25 years, he first played with a computer in 1969 at the age of 9 - 'Lunar Lander' on a paper terminal linked to a mainframe. His mum bought him his first computer, an Atari 800, in 1976.

He worked in academic computing for many years, providing support to students and staff and managing DEC Vax, BBC micros and early PC machines. He left academia in 1991 to join a succesful IT company, GND, based in London's Docklands as technical director.

The Internet was still in the hands of techies in 1991 and Kevin steered GND into Internet related technologies. He registered his first domain name and designed his first web site in 1992. In that same year he discovered and fell in love with FreeBSD, a free Unix derivitive, and not long after that Linux.

When the Internet exploded into the general public's world in 1996 GND were in the perfect position to exploit thier knowlege and experience. Kevin consulted, provided training, planned infrastructure and designed and build high performance Internet servers for universities, research foundations, major corporations and government.

In 1999 Kevin left GND for a completely different career. He joined Surrey Ambulance Service NHS Trust and started the long and challenging training to become a paramedic. But he could not completely leave the IT world behind. Doing consultancy work and building simple web based applications for small businesses, charities and individuals, zOpium was born.

Kevin had a serious accident at work in 1991 that left him unable to work operationally for many months so he worked, mainly from home, designing an intranet for the ambulance service. Having helped with the development of Plone, a web based content mangement system, since 2000 it was the obvious platform of choice for the intranet server.

The work on the intranet was very well received by Surrey Ambulance and Kevin was commissioned to design thier Internet site, again using Plone. The site won an NHS award in 2004 for its design and usability. Kevin actively encouraged other NHS Trusts to use Plone, providing them with resources and support to get them started. Plone is now being used by many NHS and other UK government agencies, much due to the almost 'evangelist' promotion work Kevin did.

Present day zOpium is focused on providing quality Internet technology solutions using Open Source software. Kevin still does most of the development work but leaves a lot of the design and media work to his associates.

How does Kevin find the time to be a paramedic and IT consultant? The simple answer is that he is passionate about computing, particularly open source development work. Also, his work as a paramedic is compacted into small blocks of long shifts. It also helps that while working as a paramedic Kevin is often 'idle', waiting for an emergency to attend, so with his beloved MacBook in hand he continues to work on IT projects.