Another new role for me!  After 14 months in my last job an opportunity presented itself that was too difficult to pass up – to join EMC as a Cloud Architect in their Global Cloud Services team.  It is my first foray into the vendor side of things so the last month has been a steep learning curve, but it is a challenge I can already tell I am going to really enjoy.

There were two or three reasons I joined EMC specifically.  One is their great reputation for supporting the development of their technical guys, second their pretty much unrivalled portfolio of technologies in the form of EMC II, VMware, VCE, Pivotal, RSA and VirtuStream etc and third, the impending merger with DELL.

This points to a really exciting time for anyone working on transformational IT projects within the newly combined company – the VMware based Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, Openstack based Neutrino Native Hybrid Cloud solution underpinning Pivotal Cloud Foundary PaaS, and ultimately having DELLs partnership with Microsoft on the Azure Stack provide another choice in the coming years.

If a customer wants an Open Source, VMware or Microsoft Hybrid Cloud, the new DELL Technologies portfolio can deliver, and Global Services  can support the technology, organisational and application transformation to take advantage of it.

I knew I was going to a team that was working on interesting projects, but having joined and seen first hand the size, scale and profile of some of the customers, I can’t help but be excited to get my hands dirty and start helping companies plot a course to their new cloud target architectures.

I’m also eager to start writing some blogs describing the solutions and capabilities that are at my disposal, covering Hybrid Cloud, Cloud Native Applications and Structured PaaS and all the transformational activity that happens alongside it.

One thing I have picked up loud and clear and which mirrors my own experiences, is that whilst we sell technology and technology solutions, they are not the ends in of themselves.   The real business value is gained when the application and organisational structures are transformed to take advantage of it.

Exciting times ahead!