Happy new year! I hope that my readers have had a good break and are fully refreshed to hit 2016 running, I know for me it is going to be a defining year after 2015. (its now March and 2015 seems a long time ago!). I have not blogged for a while and have been fairly absent from Twitter as well as LinkedIn. So where did I fall off the radar to? HIATUS!
A hiatus?
For the last six months, I have been taking a hiatus which resulted in resigning (reluctantly) from my job and making a “bucket list” which included seeing more parts of Australia I have never seen before as well as New Zealand. Sightseeing, Hiking, Wine tasting in different regions, Driving, Kayaking, Cycling, Swimming, Salmon fishing was some of the activities I did whilst on my break.
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it” – Ferris Bueller
So what is next?
I have had a lot of people ask me what next for me, and I am pleased to announce I have agreed to join the team at Oracle Australia, focusing on all things storage cloud, analytics and virtualisation and helping their channel ecosystem.
My role as Principal Technologist will see me dealing with customers of all sizes across all sectors across Australia and New Zealand and helping them to plan new I.T services through Oracle cloud as well as working with channel partners in delivering top solutions to their customers.
Why Oracle?
Simply, The People, Technology and Possibilities:
The People
Haven spoken to a lot of the people I would be working within this role, I gained a clear view and appreciation that there are some very dedicated and enthusiastic people on board which is truly exciting and invigorating – when you are surrounded with that enthusiasm and those positive attitudes, how can one not be inspired.
The Technology,
If we look at the most recent Integrated Systems Magic Quadrant published by Gartner as of August 2015, we see that Oracle along with VCE, Nutanix and HP are real contenders in the converged infrastructure market which is rising to be the future of storage platforms as we know it.
Yes, there are still companies that are focusing just on the next evolution of storage (flash), but some of these contenders will struggle as customers are no longer wanting just storage and are looking for real-world integrated packages that are proven and backed by strong ventures. There will be storage startups exiting the market this year.
The Possibilities
I like to build and grow businesses, and the Oracle storage business has so much potential to grow with some pretty impressive tech so evangelizing and educating customers and partners on why this technology can really help their I.T challenges seemed like a fun way to spend my 9-5.
Lastly, Oracle is a huge multinational and traditionally not known for storage – so the opportunity to learn other platforms and technologies other than storage was attractive. Whilst I do not think I will end up as a DBA type, I do know that their application stack sit in the Enterprise space so being able to be exposed to these platforms would be a fresh breath of air.
vExpert 2016 – Evangelist 
I am proud to be recognized again in this elite group by VMware, this will be my fourth camp receiving the Evangelist award, and although I have not been posting as much content as I have in previous years, I plan to step it up in 2016 as a new opportunity has arisen which I plan to use to engage the community.
What is really cool is that not all vExperts are alike, they are no longer posting similar content due to VMware diversifying their portfolio. This is resulting in mass generation of rich content in all aspects of VMware! We have vExperts in Server virtualization, Desktop virtualization, Network Virtualization, Automation etc. and the list has grown phenomenally since I first got awarded a few years back. A special shout out to Corey Romero for his hard work in keeping this program running.
For a more complete list please visit http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2016/02/vexpert-2016-award-announcement.html
Thats it for now, my next posts will be focused on Oracle ZFS and some of the best practices and learnings I come up with around that!
Stay tuned!
