The Double Switch

It’s been a very long time since I last wrote anything on my blog. Since that last post, so many things have changed that it’s really time to shed some light on these things. A lot of people have been asking me regarding my recent job changes, so I figured it was time to clearify this a bit.

Every year on New Year’s Eve I set a number of goals for the next year, these are usually business related and not to quit smoking since I never did that in the first place 🙂

This year I set the goal of finding the next challenge in my career, by the end of last year I moved to a pre sales role at a VAR. Since I’ve been working there for a little over 5 years, the role actually didn’t change much about my daily job. I was still supporting a lot of the post sales activities and was involved in support cases, while my role was meant to be something really different. As I was also the only technical guy in the team with Service Provider and Data Center focus I figured it was time for a change. I decided that I wanted to find an exciting new challenge outside of Telindus that gave me a surrounding of equal technical people driven to find the best solution for their customer. I also wanted to be more close to the “source” in my field, which is the reason I started looking at roles at vendors.

Cisco

I found a great role inside Cisco’s Global Enterprise Theater. This team consists of highly skilled sales and technical people around the world serving the worlds largest global enterprises. I got accepted into a team serving only 1 (very big) client. My colleagues were great and I traveled a lot throughout Europe talking about data center solutions. Although I never had the “awesome” feeling. For some reason this job never “clicked”.

Juniper

On my second day at Cisco I got a call from someone I know inside Juniper. He happily told me that he was the SE manager for a newly formed team inside the EMEA North organization of Juniper. He felt that I was a perfect fit for the role as it consisted of hosting/cloud providers, local ISPs and large enterprise data center customers. Of course I just started at Cisco so I thanked him for his interest. After months he contacted me again that they were not able to find a suited candidate for the role. After a long thought I agreed to meet with the team. As soon as I walked into the Juniper office I somehow felt home. I met everyone on the team and had interviews for 6 hours straight. My manager told me that I would hear from him about the outcome of the day. When I was driving home he already called me and told they were going to send me an offer as soon as possible. That was an amazing feeling of course. I immediately felt connected with the team and was so excited!

First few weeks

I’m writing this blog after being at Juniper now for a few weeks and I have to say it’s one of the best experiences ever. It’s exactly what I would’ve thought of it! I’m dealing with great projects at major customers. I’m developing a demo setup on about every new piece of technology both in software and products Juniper has and I’m dealing with a super flexible organization that requires some self learning, but also gives you so much freedom in choosing the work that you pursue as long as your customers benefit. I’m currently typing this on a flight to San Francisco for my new hire training in Sunnyvale and I’m so excited to meet a lot of the smart people that I’m already in touch with discussing solutions for my customers.

Quick

Moving away from Cisco after only a few months was a really hard decision. It really turns out to be one of the best decisions of my career. The reason I still decided to do it, was that I followed my heart. “It somehow already knows what you want to become, have the courage to follow it” is one of Steve Jobs’s famous quotes and that is exactly what I did in this case.

Blog

Apart from a brand new design and hosting the blog again. Be prepared for finally some technical blogging again! It’s been ages since I last did that, but in my current role I’m able to work on solutions that translate very well into blogs. I’ll be blogging on exciting Data Center evolutions, features and technologies that I’m working on. That of course will have a ton of SDN, NFV and DC Fabric goodness in it!

Stay tuned!