2016 - New Year, New Me!
- 3 minsThis post was previously hosted on a different site and then migrated here.
So this is going to be my first blog post on here, and my first blog post in over six months in any format. Suffice to say 2015 was a VERY busy year, and a lot is changing with the onset of 2016. With this in mind I just want to try and sum up the last 12 months, and the next 12 going forwards.
2015 in Review
2015 had a lot of milestones for me, I made vExpert and CiscoChampion, I was lead architect on the biggest project (£12million) I’ve had the fortune to be the given the opportunity to run with, multiple trips to Sunnyvale and conferences with the NetApp A Team, being interviewed at Cisco Live and both NetApp Insights. Like I said, “busy”!
So why “New year, new me”?
Despite all this, I’ve not felt particularly challenged with the technologies I’ve been working with. ANS are a fantastic company, the stuff they’re doing with RAPID to productise FlexPod is truly something else - shout out to my brethren and automation ninja Tim Hynes who’s making that magic happen - and I’ve had a brilliant 3 years there, but there’s only so many times you can design, or deploy a FlexPod without it becoming slightly same-y, and ANS don’t have the capacity to offer me a full time architect/evangelist position, which I’ve been hankering after for a while now.
Which leads us nicely onto…
2016 - A new year, a new me!
So, a new job is in the pipeline. Let me start by saying I’m truly grateful for ANS for 3 excellent years of growth, and that they really are industry leaders when it comes to their speciality, but from the 1st of March I shall be embarking upon a new role at Insight UK as a solutions architect.
I’ll still be specialising in converged infrastructure, but will have much more scope to branch out into wider solution design including full SDN/SDDC solutions, hybrid clouds, and all the nice app level stuff that I haven’t touched for a few years. A nice time to make the jump, as everything’s becoming commodity (I could get onto a “no-one cares about speeds and feeds anymore” rant here, but I wont) and I truly believe we all need to move up the stack soon enough.
I’m really looking forward to being given the opportunity to talk to customers about how we can help them solve their business problems innovatively through technology, and it’s an exciting new challenge for me.
So that’s it for me as far as 2016 goes, aside from the usual trips, I would make a few predictions for the year ahead, but they’ve been done by people much more clever than me (@discoposse, @sakacc, and some analysts).
Suffice to say I’m very much looking forward to seeing how the Dell/EMC merger pans out, even more looking forward to seeing Solidfire getting integrated into the wider NetApp family (SF has great product, and great people), and generally seeing how the industry continues to evolve.
It is without doubt an exciting time to be in the industry, here’s to a good new year everyone.
Ed Morgan
Technical Product Manager @ Rubrik, I like the Cloud, automation, and picking heavy things up then putting them down again.