“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.” Cit. Goethe.
Andrea Siviero is a Principal Architect for VMware Professional Services who specializes in cloud management, automation, migration, and security. He’s passionate about working with customers to understand their specific requirements, then designing and implementing a modern and effective cloud-smart strategy.
Andrea’s love for cloud infrastructures and automation is undeniable and he’s worked hard to continue his education in the discipline — even earning a VCDX in Cloud Management and Automation and becoming just the 240th IT professional in the world to accomplish the feat. He also holds a TOGAF® 9 Certified badge, another intensive test of a learner’s cloud skills.
War Games and computer games
Andrea’s interest in computer science started when he was growing up in Italy. After seeing the movie War Games at age of 10, Andrea became interested in computers and eventually started working with his first computer: a Commodore VIC-20.
However, the computer’s manuals were in English and he wasn’t sure how the recorder would work! meaning he spent nearly three hours a day copying the coding from a book so he could play a game. Eventually, he gained enough experience coding that he understood what role each individual line of code played and learned how to manipulate them, and yes, also how to save it for later on a tape using the recorder.
“For months, I was doing that over and over,” he said. “I was starting to understand the code, every single line of what this code was doing in the game. So, I started to change the code to make the game more interesting for me.”
Andrea enrolled at Università di Pavia and majored in electronics engineering specialized in Telecommunications with a Thesis on Machine learning with Neural Network for pattern recognitions of underground objects. He got his first postgraduate job as an Oracle administrator at a bank. Though learning the ins and outs of Oracle Databases required plenty of reading and studying in his free time, Andrea became skilled enough with the software that he started his own business with a friend soon thereafter.
Andrea first encountered VMware when he sought ways to achieve a competitive advantage for their business simulating networks between VMs on a single server. He realized security skills were in high demand and started to research security and virtualization certification programs, which led him to VMware Learning. After earning his first VMware certification, he was offered his first VMware position.
From Channel Engineer to Principal Architect
Andrea started his VMware career in 2006 as a Senior Channel System Engineer on a team of eight that was developing VMware Channel of Partners in Italy. From there, he moved into roles as a Technical Marketing Manager, Professional Services Engagement Manager, and Senior Solutions Architect.
As an architect for the past 12 years, Andrea has built an impressive portfolio working with customers in telecommunications and financial services.
One key project he worked on was for a telco firm based in different regions in EMEA. Andrea’s team helped to design a first-of-its-kind Cloud infrastructure to validate VMware architecture in the telco space. The accomplishment enabled the first pilot of 4G in Europe using VMware solutions. “That was one of the biggest achievements in the telco space that I was involved with,” he recalled.
Working with team also developed an outcome-focused approach to help customers understand how VMware solutions could address their business needs and deliver value. “Translating the needs of a customer into the technology and how the capabilities can help them to achieve those outcomes, was the key,” he said.
Andrea is now a Principal Architect, a designation reserved for VMware’s top customer-facing architects who demonstrated to go above and beyond VMware’s EPIC2 values and pass a stringent review board of CTO, VP and other Principals and has been invited as members of VMware’s Office of the CTO.
Andrea’s favorite part of his role? “Since I joined VMware, my favorite part of my job is still being invited into customer conversations. Presenting to customers is the thing I love because in this field you never stop learning, and you can get a lot of feedback and insights, which become golden piece of information and it builds confidence in what you know and where you should invest your time to develop further.”
Resiliency and hard work
In his free time, Andrea enjoys salsa dancing, spending time with his wife and two children, and running. He even completed his first marathon in 2015 and a second one in 2022 both under the 4Hr milestones.
His advice to aspiring IT professionals? Anyone with a genuine interest in tech who is willing to put in the work can succeed. “There’s no such thing as being a “talent”, right? Is about putting the right amount of effort and focused quality practice.” he emphasized.
He also hopes young tech enthusiasts learn to accept failure as a necessary part of mastering technology. “Failure is fundamental to becoming good at tech. The most important part of technology is resiliency, to be able to keep growing and react to problems that happen,” he said.
Andrea encourages anyone interested in tech to not just use technology because it works but to try and understand how it functions. He believes that if IT professionals have a love for tech, there’s no challenge they can’t address.
His advice for anyone: “Start with your passion and go deeper into the problem you’re trying to solve.”
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