I can’t believe its been a little over 4 months since I started at VCE as a Solution Engineer in VCE’s Corporate Engineering branch. Now that I have my bearings with my new job I figure that my readers might like an update about what I’m doing.
I know I’ve been pretty quite on my blog during those 4 months. Starting with this post I hope to get back into the swing of blogging. Especially now that I think I’ve figured out some of my job responsibilities. In this post I hope to share some of those job roles with you.
During the past 4 month’s I’ve been bringing my Virtualization skills to VCE. I’ve had the opportunity to meet a lot of people and apply my own flare to my job! Its been a wonderful period of growth that I’ve really enjoyed. I also feel that it has really benefited both myself and the company I work for.
Something I’ve been working on for several months is a public speaking program called Speak America. The whole point of Speak America is to help people be better business presenters. (http://www.speakamerica.com/) I took the Speak America training class before Thanksgiving. To complete the whole course you have to do a certification presentation. It has to consist of a bunch of different elements. In essence a sales pitch. You have to motivate someone to do something.
In the middle of January I gave my certification presentation on Converged Infrastructure and how converged infrastructure is like Lego’s (seems to be a VCE thing 😉 ). My target audience was a VMUG group. I didn’t pass the presentation exam. I’m still waiting on all the feedback to come in, only I’m pretty sure its because I didn’t put a sales pitch in the presentation. There is nothing like having Bart Queen say (paraphrasing), “I’ve listened to hundreds of presentations on this stuff. I never understood what all these engineers were talking about till I heard your presentation.” Tempered with (paraphrasing again), “there are thousands of ways to ask someone to merry you. You don’t have to make it sound like a sales pitch.” Needless to say, since I didn’t pass the certification and I have to do it again. I wonder what I’ll choose for my next topic.
I’ve also fallen in to the End User Computing (EUC) space. As some of you may know I have split opinions of VDI solutions and their place in the market space. (Post coming soon.) I’ve been working on updating and creating sizing tools to allow our team to size EUC solutions. As well as developing other EUC based solutions.
As part of the Corporate Engineering Team we’ve been asked to pick a “VMware specialty” that we would like to “major” in. I have most of the VMware certifications and this was a tough one for me. I finally decided on two. I decided to go with the Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) specialty (if you are a partner you probably know about this specialty) and I chose the EUC as a secondary specialty. BC/DR because its something I’ve done for a long time and understand extremely well. EUC, because I sort of fell into it when I started at VCE.
I’ve also been asked to become familiar with VMware’s Management suite. This means I will get a lot of experience with VMware management tools such as vCenter Operations Manager, Charge Back, etc. I’m looking forward to having the opportunity to work with these technologies and how they can improve the virtualization experience.
I really enjoy working with all the different customers and the different locations. In the morning I might be talking to a client in Russia about the components of a Vblock and how they help their organization achieve a better IT infrastructure. In the afternoon I may be talking with my co-workers about EUC. Its such a wide breadth of topics that makes for a really enjoyable day.
I’ve also been working on a lot of other cool projects. Someday I hope I get the opportunity to tell you about those. I hope you would enjoy learning about them as much as I have.
Until later,
Tony
