What if you could get to know the Hiring Managers at VMware before you come onsite for an interview? Well now you can with our new Meet the Hiring Manager series. From their own career journeys to the characteristics that they look for in candidates, we want you to hear from the people who help bring teams together at VMware – Hiring Managers.
Dan McLean, Sydney Australia
This week, meet Dan McLean, Director of the Cloud and Service Provider Group, who is based in Sydney, Australia. Dan and his teams are hiring for several positions that will help lead the work on VMware Cloud on AWS, an exciting new cloud offering, jointly developed by AWS (Amazon Web Services) and VMware.
VMware Cloud on AWS delivers a highly scalable, secure and innovative service that allows organizations to seamlessly migrate and extend their on-premises VMware vSphere-based environments to the AWS Cloud. The service is the result of significant joint engineering to create a true hybrid-cloud environment, that offers consistent operations and management with the elastic scalability of AWS. VMware Cloud on AWS is delivered, sold, and supported globally by VMware.
Ready to get to know more about Dan and his team? Read on.
VMware Careers: Dan, can you share how you’ve arrived at this point of your career?
Dan: I love tackling hard problems and doing interesting jobs. It’s led me across many industries and roles, and this diversity of experience has given me valuable perspectives on many industries and myself. I was one of the early employees of VMware. I realized that VMware was creating game changing technology that would fundamentally reshape how applications were delivered. I underestimated just how profound it would be and have enjoyed many roles with the company here in Australia and Asia. I’m fortunate to lead of a team of high performing people who work tirelessly with our customers to achieve tremendous success.
VMware Careers: How did you get into tech, in particular the sales function?
Dan: I spent many years working in technology functions, but always found how people were using technology to solve business challenges more interesting. This naturally led to sales, as it brings you closer to customers. Great sales people know their solutions, but spend more time to deeply understand their customer’s needs and map these into solutions that can drive benefit. Additionally, cloud sales, is totally merit based. Unless you are delivering value, customers won’t grow their usage or even stay on the service. There is little lock-in and your success is intrinsically linked to customer success.
VMware Careers: How does VMware ANZ (Australia/New Zealand) compare to other tech companies in Australia?
Dan: There are a lot of similarities with other global tech companies – the global reach, the scale of the systems and size of the customer base, and the opportunities to look globally in scope. I’ve had some incredibly memorable experiences in my career at VMware. What sets VMware apart is the willingness to break with status quo and innovate in order to meet the high expectations of customers. Customers in Australia and New Zealand are at the forefront of technology trends, they’re early adopters and innovators, and this puts them ahead of their global peers. Sometimes we must be willing to forego the global standard and innovate locally. VMware has always pursued this with vigor. The company has a set of values it calls EPIC2. We measure decisions against these values and genuinely strive to be a terrific place to work. It’s this willingness to try new things, to innovate and operate in a genuinely great culture that makes VMware a great place to work.
VMware Careers: Tell us about the VMware and AWS Partnership?
Dan: I’m really excited about the partnership with AWS. Australia has been one of the leading market adopters of both VMware and AWS, and bringing these two capabilities together will be incredibly powerful for our customers and partners. VMware Cloud provides the richly featured, reliable and secure platform that runs the mission critical datacenters for customers, and puts this on the AWS platform. Why is this good? Well it makes running a VMware SDDC platform incredibly simple and easy. VMware does all the hard work to design, secure and deploy the platform so customers can easily make use of it. It’s seamlessly compatible with what they have today in their own datacenter to make moving workloads easy, and it sits alongside the rich and growing array of AWS services. The compute platform can readily scale to meet demand, and customers can easily connect their AWS services into workloads running on VMC. That’s the technology front. What I’m more excited about is that it brings together two organisations obsessed with great customer outcomes. It’s this combination of customer focus and technology that is going to be at the forefront of digital transformation.
VMware Careers: You are hiring for VMware Cloud on AWS. Tell us about the type of characteristics that you look for in people?
Dan: Of course an understanding of technology and the industry is important, but what I look for most, and find most important for success, is attitude. Success comes from attitude: – Are you curious? Are you willing to work hard? Do you work effectively with others? Do you listen? Are you authentic and honest? Whilst we can train for the technology – we struggle to train for attitude.
VMware Careers: If you could offer one piece of career advice, what would it be?
Dan: Take the challenging projects that no one else wants — it’s all upside. And, see my note above regarding attitude.
The VMware and AWS teams are driving a phenomenal pace of innovation. Are you interested in joining this new dynamic team and working for leaders like Dan? Take a look at the VMware Cloud on AWS roles open in VMware Australia.
Learn more about who we are at VMware:
https://careers.vmware.com/life-at-vmware
Great Dan for your career advice and also journey that you have gone through. I liked the most is
“Of course, an understanding of technology and the industry is important, but what I look for most, and find most important for success, is attitude. Success comes from attitude – are you curious? Are you willing to work hard? Do you work effectively with others? Do you listen? Are you authentic and honest? We can train for the technology – we struggle to train for attitude.”
Yes we can get trained or can train people, but attitude one is difficult to train and person having good attitude – we can do wonders together. I see very few who echo this in today’s trend.
I am Ex VMware person – VMware is always very good company to work in – as i compare across the board – technology, people, culture.