Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

I’ve had a great time working at VMware since last year and have worked with some of the greatest minds in the industry on some interesting projects. But, after a lot of deliberation I have taken the decision to leave the relative comfort of a “permanent” position at a vendor to work on a freelance basis as an Infrastructure Architect – specialising in virtualization and cloud solutions.

My reasons for this move are varied and personal, but suffice to say that I have a number of outside ventures that are coming to fruition and I need the flexibility to work on them independently.

VMware have some great stuff in the pipeline and I’m going to enjoy working with it albeit back on the customer/partner side of the equation rather than inside, it’s also gratifying to see the cloud concepts I was working on in 2008 becoming very much mainstream – so maybe I wasn’t mad after all 🙂

VMware have some challenges and growing pains in scaling out the business and avoiding Microsoft syndrome (too much, too wide, too thin). They need to make sure that they don’t loose sight of the requirement for end-end integrated customer solutions with services and support to match. Particularly where there are so many technology acquisitions involved. That said, VMware have the best senior exec’s in the technology industry steering the ship – I can say that as I’ve met most of them over the last couple of years and they’ve been there & done it.

I will still be heavily involved in the community and need to set aside some time for vTARDIS.next and my recently neglected blog – many cool mind-bending, physics defying hypervisor inside a hypervisor posts to come!

I have some interesting professional engagements lined up and I’m looking forward to a new challenge.

Cheers