New Year with a new focus

Over 5 years ago I left a storage startup to move to EMC to be a vSpecialist.  Probably one of the most Pivotal (pun intended) moves I’ve ever made.  The numerous opportunities afforded to me here at EMC has been crazy.  I went from being a vSpecialist individual contributor, to a vSpecialist Manager to then managing a diverse group of PreSales specialists and it was awesome.  Last year I was promoted (?? ) to a Marketing Director in a new group started up by Aaron Chaisson, focused on EMC II messaging.  The idea was to bring in individuals from the field with extensive PreSales field experience to shape and deliver the new EMC messaging.  This was fun and frustrating all at the same time.    

This year I’ve been afforded another fantastic opportunity that was too good to pass up.  Just like the other roles I’ve had here at EMC, this is yet another career milestone and an opportunity to get comfortable, being uncomfortable (one of my favorite expressions). Similar to my move last year, this year a new group is being formed under Aaron focused on Cloud Native Apps and what solutions EMC has to help in this new Platform 3 world.  This team is being put together by Matt Cowger (@mcowger ), who is not only a really good friend of mine (this should be fun ) but one of the smartest, and humble people I know!  He wrote about these changes in his recent blog post “A New team for a New Application”

This doesn’t come without a slew of reservations  for Matt and myself.  I’m a Storage and Virtualization guy. It’s been my life these last 15+ years and I consider it my comfort zone. Cloud Native Apps represents a somewhat unknown to me.  Don’t get me wrong, I get the value of DevOps. I get the value of Containers and Micro Segmentation but just from the outside looking in.  Sure, I’ve read “The New Kingmakers” and “The Phoenix Project” but that was mostly from an interest perspective. In my new role, I’ll be living and consuming these books differently. I’m pretty excited because I fundamentally believe this is change is going to happen quickly!

I write this blog post for a couple of reasons.  It’s a career change and you might be interested in that.  Secondly, I’m going to guess that most of my readers/friends are like me.  We have a Storage and Virtualization background but recognize that the world is changing and Cloud Native Apps seems to be the buzz word phrase of the day.  We are seeing more and more interest in things like Docker and Rocket. We are hearing more and more about Automation and Orchestration; DevOps and Agile development.  I sort of feel like the Operations side of the house (my background) needs to get a little more up to speed with the Developers side  

So my plan is to post more about my journey.  What sorts of things am I doing to help bridge the Operations side of my background with the Developer side.  I plan on jumping in with both feet and documenting the hell out of this process.  What training am I doing, what sorts of stuff am I doing in my home lab, what podcasts and books am I reading etc.  I plan to immerse myself in this process.  I also hope that as I go down this journey, if you know of training tools, blog posts, podcast that I might be missing you’ll let me know in the comments section!  If nothing more, I’m pretty confident there are a LOT of people like me in this industry wanting to make sure we don’t miss this new wave !

So with that said – LET’S DO THIS!!!!

@vTexan <—follow me on twitter for real time training fun