In the fast-paced world of enterprise IT, success often stems from being in the right place at the right time — and having the expertise to seize the moment. For Chris Reno, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer (TME) at NetApp, a fortuitous convergence of virtualization technology and customer needs launched him into a career that continues to evolve with the industry.
Building Solutions from Real-World Challenges
Chris’s journey into technical marketing began with hands-on problem-solving. While working in NetApp’s product engineering support team, he helped develop a large-scale grid environment to meet the company’s testing requirements. As their needs grew, virtualization became the natural solution for scaling their infrastructure and stress testing various storage systems. What started as an internal success story quickly caught the attention of customers facing similar challenges.
This timing coincided with VMware’s rising prominence in Enterprise IT, where businesses were discovering the transformative benefits of consolidation through virtualization. The growing demand for virtualization solutions led to the development of NetApp’s converged infrastructure offering, FlexPod—and Chris found his calling in the solutions space. Customers needed a blueprint and a reduction in risk to help navigate the development of new use cases.
“In addition to content creation throughout the year, I serve as our technical lead as we look to put our best foot forward at VMware Explore with the content we create.”
Driving Customer Success Through Technical Marketing
Today, as part of NetApp’s Global Innovation, Solutions, and Alliances team, Chris collaborates with technical alliance partners to develop solutions that address customers’ virtualization and cloud needs. His role involves creating accessible technical content—from blogs and videos to documentation—that help customers understand and implement complex solutions more effectively. Additionally, sharing this content at VMware Explore helps keep the team grounded in real-world challenges their customers are facing.
“The thing that brings me the most joy is hearing about the unique ways in which customers use our products and solutions,” Chris shares. “I like setting people up for success because I have been the one to get off-hours calls when things fail. Best practices and highly available systems allow you to take chances and innovate because you know the infrastructure is rock solid.”
The VMware Explore Impact
VMware has been instrumental in Chris’s career trajectory. Having attended numerous VMworld events and the last six VMware Explore conferences across Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Barcelona since the return to in-person events in 2022, he’s witnessed firsthand the evolution of virtualization technology and its impact on enterprise IT.
A particularly memorable milestone spans recent VMware Explore events, showcasing the power of persistent innovation. NetApp ONTAP has long been a trusted storage option with VMware on-premises and at VMware Explore US 2022, Chris and his team introduced NFS datastore support in AWS with VMware Cloud. By VMware Explore EMEA, they had expanded to include support for Microsoft Azure VMware Solution. The journey continued with Google Cloud VMware Engine support, and by VMware Explore 2023, ONTAP was supported across all three major cloud providers—bringing the vision of hybrid multi-cloud to life.
“In a year’s time we had introduced multiple industry firsts and had customers join us to share their successes at VMware Explore,” according to Chris. The innovation has continued every day since to include new customers and use cases.
Navigating Industry Changes
In today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape, Chris emphasizes the importance of adapting to changing customer needs. “The emergence of cloud, containers, and AI/ML is well-documented,” he notes. “But what’s equally important is how we consume technical material to do our jobs as we learn about new developments.
“We stand behind the work we do. We never want to leave a customer in a worse position or a convoluted configuration to just turn on a feature that they may or may not realize real benefits from.”
He points to a significant shift in how technical information is consumed: “Gone are the days of 300+ page manuals being the standard offering. Administrators need to consume technical how-tos in much smaller chunks to get to the tidbits they actually need.” As such, his team works to develop relevant content for everyone from decision makers to admins.
Advice for Aspiring Technical Marketers
For those looking to follow a similar career path, Chris offers two key pieces of advice. First, don’t underestimate the value of foundational IT experience: “I have many stories from being an admin and many lessons learned.” Second, stay technically engaged: “Your peers can sense when you haven’t had real keyboard time on an offering, and if you lose credibility, you lose your audience in any environment.”
Looking Forward
As a regular participant in VMUG and vExpert communities, Chris continues to champion the value of networking and peer learning. For him, VMware Explore events provide an invaluable opportunity to hear directly from practitioners about their daily challenges and successes with VMware technologies—insights that prove crucial for developing solutions that truly serve customer needs.
When he’s not working on the next big solution, you might find Chris enjoying outdoor activities like hiking and camping, or working on home renovation projects, where he applies his technical skills to developing 3D models for his designs.
Connect with Chris Reno:
- Twitter: @thechrisreno
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thechrisreno
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