It’s time to start a new chapter in my life. I’ve been at my current job since Sept. of 1993, almost 18 years. My job is at a small restaurant company (Boston Market) as a senior systems admin who has responsibilities for many areas including VMware, Lotus Domino, IBM WebSphere, Windows Server and much more. I’ve done a lot in those 18 year sand have a pretty diverse background in many different areas. I’ve never really had an area that I wanted to specialize in, security & web technologies is what interested me most until I got bitten by the VMware bug 5 years ago. When it came to virtualization, for the first time in my life I found a technology that I was passionate about. I started getting very active in the VMware VMTN community forums where I made Guru status in less than a year. My exposure in the forums lead to other opportunities, publishers wanted me to write books and I actually had competing offers from different publishers to sign with them.
I also started writing for Tech Target, on a whim I had sent them an email seeing if they were interested in having me write for them. I had never really thought of myself as a writer before then, but I thought I would give it a try and see how I liked it. I found that I really enjoyed it and I was actually pretty good at it. Writing isn’t as easy as you might think, it takes dedication, patience and a skill to be able to present your thoughts to readers in a manner that they can easily understand and follow. I’ll admit I was a little green in the beginning but over time and with the help of editors I learned how to become a much better writer. I’ve been writing continually now for over 3 years and I still find that I enjoy it and continue to improve my skills at it.
I also started this little website originally called vmware-land.com about 4 years ago, my goal was to share information and collect links that would help others find the information that they need. I used to find a common theme in the VMTN forums, the same questions got asked over and over so rather than answer them in full all the time why not send them to links where they were already answered. Hence my beginning with link collections, I’ve kept up with it continually since then, but instead of focusing more on links from the VMTN forums I moved to gathering links from all the sources available on the internet from the many VMware related blogs and websites.
I’ve enjoyed being a freelance writer over the years which is basically my night job and haven’t really been looking to changing my day job, I’ve had offers that were pretty attractive but I was comfortable where I was at and for me to change jobs it really had to be the perfect job. I’ve known Calvin Zito from HP for a while now and have attended several HP blogger events, Calvin has been pretty tenacious for a while now in trying to convince HP that they really need to hire me and finally at the recent HP Discover conference he got me in front of one of HP’s storage executives to discuss an opening they had. I heard them out and told them I’d be interested in hearing more about the position. For me to change jobs I had two basic criteria, one I had to believe firmly in the company and two I had to make sure I would thoroughly enjoy the position. Both HP and the job position met that criteria, one thing I really liked about HP is that they cover everything in the data center, servers, storage, networking and much more. So long story short after many interviews with people at HP like Craig Nunes, Marc Farley, Mike Kokopen, Vish Mulchand and Steve Crimi they offered me the position.
So I’ll be joining HP at the end of the month in the position of Solutions Manager – Storage for Server Virtualization. HP has a strong presence in Colorado with big campuses in Ft. Collins, Boulder (LeftHand) and Colorado Springs. I’ll be able to work out of my house and also have space available in Boulder when needed. I’m excited about the position, I’ll be dealing with many areas inside HP including product development, strategic relationships and sales & marketing and cover everything related to storage and virtualization. I’m really looking forward to getting started with HP and making as much as impact as I can with my years of experience with virtualization.
I wish to thank Calvin as the driving force for pushing both myself and HP together and to the VMware community that has driven me to be the person that I am today that made this opportunity possible.
