"I am outstanding and exceptional" is what I will say if you ever ask how I am doing. It started as an interesting 2 second elevator pitch to start conversations but has evolved to a life philosophy. It is both my daily goal and the bar by which I measure how I lived my day in every area of my life. Did I do an outstanding job helping people? What exceptional thing did I do in my work? Was I an outstanding father and husband today? Each of us seeks to be better and this is my mechanism to keep me focused to that end.
I started my technical career as a network engineer and manager for a medium size school district of about 60 sites where I needed to ensure connectivity and application performance for 25,000 students, teachers and administrators. Having moved their datacenter with over 100 servers and multiple OC-3 circuits with no downtime, I felt I was fairly accomplished at it!
I fully appreciated the help I had received from my technology partners and the next phase of my adventures started when I received an opportunity to move from being the customer to being the solutions provider. This allowed me to help many folks with my skills and experience. I started as the sole engineer for a small VAR and the 3 of us grew that business to about 12 of us with ~$15M in revenue. Then the real excitement began when we were acquired by Teneo which opened up so many new possibilities! Teneo is a specialist integrator of next generation technologies and as such we are constantly assessing the market for tools to help our customer. We also de-risk adoption of those technologies by providing services and deep subject matter expertise for the life of the technology. I participate in Teneo’s technical innovation team to help seek out and assess new technologies and solutions that will help solve a pressing need for CIOs, IT Directors, and engineers (like I was.)
I have experience with networking, visibility, WAN-Op, and security, but my latest work has been around application performance via SD-WAN. I helped found our SD-WAN practice and interviewed SD-WAN companies to determine their solution’s viability. I would have preferred if a single solution met everyone’s needs, but we ended up choosing, what are now, the industry leaders. I still run a vendor agnostic workshop to help customers understand the features of the SD-WAN technology, map those to their business and technical requirements, and prioritize those to get to the vendors who can actually deliver on their goals. Would that be exceptional for you? I hope so!