critical mass of support for a given technology in order to establish it as a
technical standard in a market that is subject to network effects.
It’s been a nice ride these last few weeks. Less than a month ago I publicly announced resigning my current vacation as a Solutions Team Lead and I am already looking forward to this new opportunity.
VEEAM speed
One of the first things I came across in my search for this new gig was “VEEAM speed“. I know some local people like @bertarnauts and @d_steven that already planted an egg in my brain how much they loved working at VEEAM and off course @rickvanover did some effort too. But when I said I’d be available for new opportunities they took this to a whole new level. Soon I was in contact with Doug Hazelman who was looking for an evangelist to cover the entire EMEA market. Because Doug was in Europe he wanted to do a face2face interview. So I made a trip to Zurich two weeks ago. Apparently it was some kind of Executives quarterly meeting so I got interviewed not only by Doug but also by Ratmir Timashev, the CEO of VEEAM. At first this felt really awkward but we managed to have a very interesting conversation and I very much appreciate the time he took to talk to me.
Software? For real?
Yep, software. As you all know by now I was the iron man, focused on datacenter hardware, specifically storage. Although I have been talking to some storage vendors those jobs were either too technical (I don’t dream in syntax) or too local. I love talking about storage but the most fun part in that line is the talking. So being an evangelist for a software company I like tops being an engineer for a storage company (I like) any day.
Why did I agree on the VEEAM offer? In the interview in Zurich Ratmir Timashev told me I could ask him some questions too. He told me before that they have been able to double the figures year after year and would be keep on doing that and becoming a billion dollar company one day. I asked him which competitor would be able to get in his way of getting there. If there is one to fear, who would that be? He really had to think a few seconds and honestly answered me: none! And I believed him instantly.
The Dark Side
Yep, it has happened. Everyone knows how much I loved being an independent and it took me a while before accepting that going to the dark side was in fact the only viable opportunity at this point. I promise that I will keep following enterprise IT and storage in specific on this blog and that I will always try to keep my unbiased glasses on. Please help me when I lose that! I will miss the invites that I might be missing as an independent blogger (i.e. Storage TechFieldDay). We might catch up on the same events but I’ll probably be wearing a green shirt then. So instead of the DARK side I’ll make it my GREEN side!
So maybe that HULK theme is still going to work out for me someday 🙂