It’s hard to believe that my one year anniversary at PernixData is in 3 months. I have to say that coming here has been the best career decision I’ve ever made. I’m proud to be a part of the fastest growing software infrastructure company in history and surrounded by highly talented and passionate people. Having come from the customer side, specifically a medical practice, it’s interesting to be part of a software company and be a part of a startup.

PernixData is now a 3 year old company and I previously didn’t think I would ever join a startup. When I considered other opportunities at other young companies in the past, my family always cautioned me on having stability. I stayed at a 30 year old company for 10 years in the name of comfort and stability and I have some regrets about it. Louisiana isn’t busting at the seams with jobs in enterprise IT so the associated risk of joining a startup and losing my job one day weighed heavily on me. The security of an established organization was very comforting but I recognized that my growth was extremely limited due to the size of the organization and their plans for growth. Building the proverbial IT mansion was fun because I left the organization with a solid infrastructure but after the projects were over, the upkeep was minimal and the days became mundane. The decision to move on came down to fulfilling a desire to grow professionally by facing a new challenge outside of out of my comfort zone.

When going to a startup there can be a lot of risk and a lot of reward. Aside from believing in the architecture, what gave me comfort in joining a young company is it’s leaders. Satyam Vaghani and Poojan Kumar aren’t household names but they were both seasoned VMware alum that had a vision and brought along a team of world class developers that could execute that vision.

There’s risk with everything in life, but I opted to set aside my overly cautious feelings about job security and jumped right in because I only see PernixData continuing to grow.

The transition from Director of IT to Systems Engineer was exactly the change I was looking for because I was burnt out with operations. The career change also gave me the opportunity to explore existing, new, and upcoming technologies and understand how they relate to FVP. In my previous role, my experience with various hardware and software configurations were limited because there I felt learning about them wasn’t beneficial because they weren’t relevant to my job nor would we ever need to implement a solution like it. (Note: I recognize this was a terrible mindset to have and have since changed.)

As the Director of IT of a small company, I was responsible for maintaining the infrastructure and I was the manager of a desktop tech. The desktop guy was great at his job but I didn’t have a peer to collaborate with. That’s why starting a VMUG in Louisiana was important to me — I wanted a community of peers to share and learn with about virtualization.

The PernixData SE team is a great example of the peer community that I wanted to be part of. I’m surrounded by around 20 other engineers that have come from various backgrounds such as a fellow IT Director, virtualization admins, VMware instructor, and experienced SEs. Each of us has worked in different verticals and with different applications, hardware, and end users. This diversity allows each of us to bring our unique experiences and contribute them to the team and further develop a highly skilled and technical team. I’m also very proud that over 90% of our team are VMware vExperts.

What has been the most fun about working at PernixData is meeting people across the country and challenging them to re-think how they purchase storage and drive application performance. During the POC process, I love talking about technology with customers, learning about each company’s environments and challenges, and ultimately letting FVP speak for itself. In my opinion, being able to stand behind the product that you sell is ultimately what removes some of the challenges of being in sales and makes it enjoyable.

If you work for PernixData at HQ, there’s a lot of perks but as a remote employee I don’t benefit from but working at home is a great supplement. I don’t know how I could ever go back to working in an office, that’s for sure! Personally, the transition from office worker to teleworker hasn’t been difficult because I talk to quite a few customers everyday and always staying in touch with team members.

On a personal note, my wife is almost always home because she works at night as a registered nurse. For some, working from home while their spouse is there has presented challenges. This hasn’t been the case for us but YMMV! Another perk that I enjoy about working from home is being to take my kids to school occasionally and always being here when they get home from school. Once they’re home, they love to come into my office and keep me company for the rest of the day. It’s not always unicorns and rainbows though, I have to kick them out quite a bit!

Overall, I’m very pleased with how the last 9 months have turned out and always looking forward to the next day.