NetApp

I am a Solution Architect who prefers to be customer-focused, and I absolutely love working for this company. I am armed with data and plenty of resources to call upon when trying to help my customers design their solutions. I don't have to be the master of everything on-premises and in the cloud, but when I call on those resources to help me out, there is an expectation that I will stick with them and use the opportunity to learn. It isn't just about us selling stuff, but I feel like I get a chance to grow every day in my job.

Over the last two years, we have had a lot of product development and also many acquisitions. Unfortunately, with COVID, we have moved our annual Insight Conference virtual. This makes it really hard to truly learn the new things we are doing. Sure, I can speak to it, but I am not as competent to get online and actually build out a customer's CVO instance as I can with their traditional on-premises flash array/SSD systems. I think it is a curse across all of the IT industry, but we do need a chance to just "stop" the selling motion and get in and get our hands dirty with some in-person training.

We have been going so hard and so fast during COVID that many of us aren't as competent on our new technologies as we should be. The virtual training is good, but it doesn't match up with in-person training. Every IT company is struggling with this, but we should get a jump on our competition by getting back to some in-person, in-depth technical training at our regional offices.