CSman Arrives

What a great day! I got up quite early today to catch a train to NYC, but, I did not make the trek alone! I now have a perpetual travel partner to keep me entertained as I traipse around the country for Cleversafe. Introducing, CSman! Who wouldn't want a little green dancing robot following them around?

So, on the train, after downing my daily allotment of caffeine, I busted out CSman, wound him up and gave him some room! My seatmate on the train was trying to ignore him, but, finally, she broke down and actually giggled! CSman scores his first smile!

CSman dancing on the Acela

A couple hours later, we arrive at the Disney/ABC facility in NYC to assist my colleague, Kevin Sullivan, install a few servers for a proof of concept system. We fully expected to be there at least 6 or 7 hours, but, wow, less than two hours later, all the servers were installed and fully configured! Where's the "Easy Button" when you need it? Of course, CSman wanted to dance again and this time, I joined him!

CSman rocking on a dsNet

Well, it's safe to say that our first outing together was a success. I'm looking forward our future exploits together. Keep an eye out for CSman. You never know where he might show up!

Transitions

So many transitions! From a big company to a small company. From a well established brand to a fledgling brand. From a pure marketing role to sales engineering/marketing/partner rep/bottle washer. From user experience solutions to storage solutions. What a ride so far.

The most fun though has been moving from representing a 'known' technology to representing a new, disruptive technology. There's nothing like a customer call where everyone is nodding their heads in agreement and sitting forward in their seats, anxious to ask the next question. Who would have ever thought talking about storage could be so exciting and interesting??  :-)

Just today, Rita (Joseph) and I had 60 minutes of time with two senior level government execs downtown. Not even 30 minutes into the meeting (which was our first visit with this team, btw), they were already identifying projects for us. Wow! I'm accustomed to it taking 2 or 3 visits before a customer begins to grasp the concepts that were being presented! And this meeting is illustrative of all the meetings we've had thus far.

As a sales engineering/marketing/partner rep/bottle washer, I feel like I'm working in the midst of the perfect storm, a customer market with definable pain and technology that offers a fresh, easy to explain solution to the pain.

Yep, transitions can be awesome.

Welcome!

Hello!

Hm, so, it's back to the dreaded 'blank page' of a start up blog! Intimidating, daunting, exciting. Will anyone care what I have to say? After being ask to change roles at my previous employer, Adobe, I opted to take a break from writing. As it turned out, the break was a little longer than I anticipated, however, I'm now feeling inspired to participate again!

I recently joined a new company, Cleversafe as the Director of Federal Solutions (I'm so happy to be back on the government side of a company!). We are a smaller company focused on solving the challenges associated with scaling systems to deal with extremely large amounts of data, systems where a petabyte is nothing more than a starting point!

So, coming from my solutions background, where much of my time has been focused on user experience and other such topics, moving into a more infrastructure-centric company has opened a whole new set of topics for me to delve into.

I'm looking forward to sharing with and learning from as many people as possible. And occasionally, because I do tend to allow my attention to wander, I may stray from the path of technology and chat about music, movies, books, dogs, kids or whatever else may come to mind!

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Bobby