Tuesday 9 August 2011

I'm back...

I know, I know, it's been a while - almost a year in fact - since I last posted any thoughts on here. I never went away but a few things have certainly changed and, for a while, I had neither the time nor the inclination to continue writing this blog if I'm honest. All that is different now though, I have a new motivation and energy - a change is as good as a rest, as they say - and a new area of IT to get my teeth into.

In March, I moved on from my role at COMPUTERLINKS, where I was looking after the Citrix franchise for 5 years and, latterly, getting a newly-formed virtualisation division on its feet. COMPUTERLINKS and Citrix parted company at the end of 2010 and, for the few of you who have followed this blog since its inception (for which I am extremely grateful!), you may expect me, at this point, to go into great detail on my thoughts around that decision. I have though, for better or worse, changed my attitude slightly since then. The controversy that I have unleashed in the past (which occasionally got me into scrapes with various figures of authority!) is now all but gone. As a result, whilst continuing to try and air my views honestly and openly, I will refrain from making comments that might get me into trouble! Maybe I have just grown up and the angry little man has disappeared...

My new working life is quite different. I am now in the promised land of "vendor-dom". I work for DataCore Software - still virtualisation (so I can retain the title of this blog for now), just this time it's storage, rather than servers and desktops. Life as a vendor is very different from distribution. You feel you have a lot more control over your own destiny, rather than continually being crunched from both sides - the resellers and the vendors. Having said that, distribution gave me an invaluable grounding in what the channel needs and, more importantly, doesn't need and I hope I can bring some of my experience to bear now.

DataCore makes fantastic technology, the equal of which is pretty much non-existent. We are a hypervisor-type layer that sits above an organisation's storage infrastructure and virtualises their disk arrays, regardless of what type of disk it is and which hardware manufacturer made it. More on our company and technology in later blogs.

Anyway, I'll make some sort of attempt to keep this as up to date as I can. News comes thick and fast in the IT industry and Twitter just doesn't cut it sometimes. I would love to read the odd reaction from time to time too, so please do comment.

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