Career

Autumn seems to be a time for the winds of change to blow through our industry, and this year that’s true for me.

TL;DR - I’m leaving VMware PSO to join the Cloud Management Business Unit as a Technical Marketing Manager for Cloud Automation!

It’s been a little over two years since I joined VMware as a Senior Conusltant in the EMEA NSX Practice, and in that time I’ve enjoyed some great opportunities, worked with some great people and technologies. And I’ve learned a lot since taking on my first NSX-T design just days after joining. But, as I mentioned when I joined a couple of years ago , I’ve always said NSX comes alive when it’s automated by vRA. In fact, almost every engagement I’ve done over the past two years has had a strong vein of automation running through it.

It has been a few years since I read (and lost) a great article on career progression and personal insight. That article helped me relax into who I am from a professional point of view, but it also challenged me.

I have been in IT for over 20 years now and in truth the first 10 years were not so great (perhaps a story for another time) but it was when I stumbled upon the vCommunity by way of Twitter and then subsequently I attended my first VMUG (in London) which completely challenged and changed my way of thinking and approach to my career. Talking to and observing peers whom I respected gave me a lot of inspiration to re-evaluate what I was doing in my career, why I did what I was doing and perhaps most importantly of all was I really being the best I can be?

It has been a while since I have had time to write a blog post, the last quarter of last year was pretty crazy from a work point of view.

Regardless, it is now a New Year and my tech focus is turning very much on CMP related things particularly vRealize Automation. (I am also very much looking forward to learning more about VMware’s CaS which I saw demo’d at the UK VMUG late last year by Grant Orchard )

Upon seeing others in the wider community making a blog post like this as a marker in the sand I thought I would follow suit as a way to see what I have learned and goals I would like to achieve in the coming year. 2017 was a good year and a very busy one at that, I got to see a lot of new places on my work travels and met some really amazing, clever and talented people.

Why do IT projects fail?

I am sure if you ask that question to ten people you will get 10 different answers, or at the very least a wide variety of reasons. The product chosen to deliver the solution was a poor match, the product was implemented incorrectly, the PM sucked, the Vendor gave no support, insufficient training material/resources, poor interoperability, the list goes on and on.

One issue I have observed from time to time on my travels is quite different from the above listed examples. In fact, (and this is my personal observation and opinion) the real issue can be hidden under the reasons listed above.

Transforming Networking and Security for the Digital Era

Wednesday morning I attended the Network and Security keynote which, if I’m honest, I found to be a bit boring. To be fair, it was probably aimed at business leaders and maybe not those that are technical. There were three customer stories, but I would have liked to have heard much more about the problems that NSX solved for them specifically, rather than being datacenter transformation/cloud journey stories that included NSX. For me, it felt like there was nothing new in the presentation that hadn’t been covered in the general sessions. I would have liked to have seen and heard a bit more what the NSBU’s leadership think is going to be big over the next 5 years.

I was honoured to be asked to be part of VMware’s CrowdChat for the general sessions this year, the idea being to live-tweet the General Session as it progressed. I’ve tried to embed the session from CrowdChat itself below, but it might be blocked by your browser for running unsafe scripts. You can also see the commentary on the Day Two General Session here .

[http://www.via-cc.at/657sc]

I was honoured to be asked to be part of VMware’s CrowdChat for the general sessions this year, the idea being to live-tweet the General Session as it progressed. I’ve tried to embed the session from CrowdChat itself below, but it might be blocked by your browser for running unsafe scripts. You can also see the commentary on the Day One General Session here.

[http://www.via-cc.at/057s1]

VMware vSAN 2017 Specialist Exam

I always like to take a discounted exam at VMworld, this year I opted for the VMware vSAN 2017 Specialist exam, which was released a few weeks ago. Having delivered quite a few vSAN based solutions over the last few years, I was fairly confident in the blueprint. I am pleased to say that I passed the exam with a score of 422, way higher than I expected! I thought the exam itself was fair, and covered and tested the basics of vSAN well. You definitely need to know the supported architectures and how storage policies effect and apply to the data on vSAN.

**a non-VMware employee! I am very much looking forward to meeting friends old and new during the week, so if you see me come say hi!

Where can you find me?

During the day I’m likely to be found in the bloggers area, or hanging around the vBrownbag stage, when I’m not in a session. Monday evening I’ll be leading a fearless team of hackers for the VMware {Code} Hackathon, hoping to create something cool! Tuesday evening I will be at the vExpert party, and Wednesday is the VMworld Customer Appreciation Party (I’m pretty excited to see Kaiser Chiefs play!). This year I’ve opted to fly back on Thursday morning and see my wife and kids, so I won’t be about.