New Era, New Serial Number

Since at least the beginning of 2016 I have been waiting and watching the technical marketing community and thinking more and more this is where I would like to be and how could I speed this process up.

I really upped my game at the start of 2016 with a goal to achieve the above, even though I didn’t really know how long it would take to be honest. I started making contact with peers in the industry all over the place to find out what they were doing out there in the communities and also on their own personal brand, I took the bait and started applying this to myself, slowly but surely I saw more and more foot fall to my site and more and more interaction from members of the community.

Cisco Live 2016 EMEA rolled around pretty quick and this was my first event of the year, I was on the Veeam stand practising my booth babe skills. But I also had a few blog posts lined up to hit during the week. I also knew some pretty influential people from Veeam and other vendors would also be over so I made it my business to befriend and get to know more about them and what it takes to be in this type of role.

Off the back of the event it was back to the day job of being a Systems Engineer for Veeam, don’t get me wrong I love the systems engineer role and I would encourage anyone to take a look. It really is a blast, speaking to customers of all different shapes and sizes. Public speaking at local events, probably the biggest for me was the IP Expo event in London and also the latest Veeam ON Forum event. The chance to attend a lot of EMEA conference shows is a huge bonus in this role. I was also able to provide some technical whitepapers for the corporate site as well as a corporate blog which was something I was interested in doing but not a must for the role as a Systems Engineer.

A few months down the line I was minding my own business and get the news that Luca Dell’Oca was transitioning into a Cloud Architect position – he documents his reasons and move here on his site – http://www.virtualtothecore.com/en/back-technical-roots/

I felt this must only mean one thing…. backfill for his evangelist position!!!!!

In the middle of July a “Technical Evangelist EMEA” role was finally posted for all to apply notifications from our Veeam careers portal did not let me down and I am pretty certain I was the first person to see the role.

The rest is history…. On 15th September I was officially offered the role, something that I thought would actually take a couple of years to happen, I am going to be rubbing shoulders with some of the greatest guys in our technical industry all with Rick Vanover at the helm leading the push on this group.

As an evangelist for a vendor like Veeam there is a requirement, obviously, to know your own products, but also to be a generalist when it comes to our Alliance Partners and other surrounding technologies.

My specialist subjects will be VMware, as we have a couple of guys on the team that already have a deep understanding and knowledge of the Microsoft piece. I will also be focussing on our storage partners and integration, both areas in which I already have a strong background and technical communities that I am already well embedded in.

So what does this mean…. Well it means lots of content creation, lots of public speaking at local events & also those larger conference events as well as other community events across EMEA and sometimes further afield. But ultimately I still get to work with a great team, great company and great products!

Is it the dream job? I think so in my current career progression and how much I enjoy all of the above I think this is where I can really embrace what is thrown at me even if it means being put out of my comfort zone a few times, you really do learn from those moments.

I would like to take this time to thank all of those people in similar roles that I reached out to, you know who you are and if I have not bought you a beer already then I will be sure to do so when we next meet up. I would also like to thank all of the Internal Veeam people that listened when I was badgering about the role and sharing my interest, again you know who you are, I will stop asking now…