As with all careers there comes a point when you make a decision about what’s really important to you. This decision involves looking at what’s important to you from a work perspective and also, and I’d argue more importantly, from a home/life perspective. Today we are seeing a shift from the 9 to 5 worker to the always on/work from anywhere worker. While this is great for flexibility, it does mean that your work and home life intermix quite a lot. As a father to a young daughter and another one on the way I have decided to prioritize my family time over my work time. This may change in the future but right now it’s the right decision for me. I have worked as a client-facing consultant for small consultancy firms for the past 3 years and this has involved a large commitment of my personal time into being able to perform the role to the best of my ability and to provide our customers with the service levels they both expect and require. It has been an amazing learning experience to see how different consultancy firms work out their place in the market and how they also deal with the challenges of growing the companies. As an IT person there’s a requirement, and shall I add enjoyment, to keep on top of what’s currently available on the market, who the competitors are and how these products fit it with or compete with your product portfolio or product strategies. This means that IT is part of my life and I love what I do but my family life and time was suffering due to work expectations. And so my decision has been to leave a consultancy role and join the dark-side as a permanent staff member.

I’ve recently started in a new role for a large pharmaceutical company as a Senior Systems Engineer. Within the role my primary focus will be on VMware, Cisco UCS, Netapp MetroCluster and also driving the data center and application/desktop virtualization strategy and roadmaps. I’ve worked with Flexpod for the past 9 months with two very large clients, one of which was using Flexpod as their platform to deliver a public cloud offering wrapped up in a Rackspace style managed service. Flexpod is a complex system. There are a number of other IT systems on the market which are far easier to use and deploy but they don’t provide the same level of knowledge of storage, networking, compute and virtualization. To work with Flexpod you need to understand all components within the Pod and this leads to a better understanding of technology as a whole. In my new role I’ll be working with UCS Director for automation to improve the efficiency of the infrastructure deployment and also focus on chargeback components to help convert the IT department into a cost center that can make departments responsible for their own IT spend.

My new role is a step up from my previous position and I’m looking forward to the challenge and responsibility. As with all new roles it takes a bit of time to find your feet and make your mark. I’m looking forward to getting to grips with all the systems that need to be supported and figuring out how to improve processes and technology to drive innovation within the IT department. All while enjoying time with my family and getting to see my daughter and soon to exist child grow and develop. I’m excited about the possibilities over the coming years and my role within those.

For anyone that has been on this blog in the past you will know that I’m not the most prolific blogger. Over the next while I do intend to keep the blog up to date a bit more and try to develop at least one decent blog post a month. At the moment I don’t have a strategy in place for what I want this blog to be other than a placeholder for some work I’ve carried out, issues I’ve faced and managed to resolve, or just general chat about technology that is coming out. Maybe down the road it will become a bit more specific. Hopefully with a bit of extra time that I now have I can blog a bit more 🙂