Its all about the journey, not the destination…

Imagine just over two and half years ago walking into a dark amphitheater in Hopkinton, MA not knowing what awaits except you’ll be joining a small group of others enlisted to help build a virtualization-focused team at (not your average) storage vendor. Boy was I wrong about both of these. First, it wasn’t just about building a small team of virtualization-focused individuals that would evangelize the synergy between EMC and VMware to our partners and customers, it was also about something much larger…transformation…more on that in a bit. I remember in one of the first meetings we had with Chad Sakac, about nine hours into his lecture something he said wasn’t as scary as it initially sounded and it started to make far more sense. He said, and I have to paraphrase…you guys are golf pros, you’re here to make your students better than you and if you do your job right you’ll put yourself out a job…meaning that we existed not only to make sure that our customers understood the integration between EMC and VMware technologies, but we were here to help transform the entire technical presales organization at EMC to be vSpecialists. Second, I really had no idea at the time, but EMC is much, much more than a great storage company (this is only one of the areas of the industry where they are considered a market leader) but I digress as this post is more about my transformation than their’s…even though there is a symbiotic relationship.

When I first joined the vSpecialist team I had no idea where it would lead as we had a big job in front of us and we were still finding our way and change was constant. Basically, we were running a startup within EMC and we just did what needed to be done, this attitude and latitude was essential to our success and allowed us to quickly build our individual and team brand. We went from a small, but growing team of individuals crisscrossing the country (sometimes the globe) working with our customers and partners to educate and enable them, to a divisionally-aligned global organization with not only a focus on virtualization, but other areas like Enterprise Management (my focus), End User Compute (EUC), Security and much more. Not only was I drinking from the firehose when it came to the EMC’s hardware and software solutions, but VMware’s Enterprise management products along with keeping up with products I already knew well like SRM, View, etc. My brain would fill up on a regular basis, so I had to switch to my other passion, BBQ, once and while to help keep my sanity. More on that here. But there’s even more, during this time I was also starting to get more and more involved with the EMC Education group on the EMC Cloud Architect (EMCCA) courses and associated exams. This allowed me to help bring the real world to otherwise academic world and truly make a difference at a much larger scale than I imagined.

Looking back at past 17 years I’ve spent in the world of Information Technology and I’m amazed at the road I’ve traveled…I worked at a helpdesk, managed teams of traveling consultants, ran the daily operations of a consumer-facing data center for a Big 3 automaker, built a successful virtualization practice at a local VAR and joined an amazing company to help transform an entire industry…I’m not done yet…

I’m excited to announce the next leg of my journey, as of this Monday I’ve officially transitioned to the vSpecialist Service Provider team where I’ll be working as a Cloud Architect on things like service offering creation, technical enablement and with our sales teams to assist our customers with their transformation. I’ll basically have a front row seat to the capture of workload and its transition to the cloud.

Like I stated in the title of this post, its all about the journey, not the destination…

Stay tuned.

Chris

2012

08/30

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