Blog URL: www.hp.com/storage/blog
Twitter handle: @HPStorageGuy
Current employer: HP
How did you get into IT in the first place?
I attended a technical university out of high school as I had an early fascination with engineering. My first job out of college was as a field engineer working on systems and peripherals (including storage before there was RAID) for HP. I moved from the field into the storage division in 1990 and have been there ever since.
How did you get into working with VMware and becoming a 2011 vExpert?
I started focusing on social media in 2008 and by 2009 I was attending most of the major events. I had just got on Twitter and attended VMworld 2009 and met John Troyer at the event. He invited me to bring HP to a VMware Community podcast shortly after that – the number of followers who were VMware focused exploded and it was an obvious choice for me to focus a lot of what I did on VMware. I was honored to be named a vExpert for the first time and promptly did 8 podcasts on the July 12 announcement.
What would you tell someone who wanted to get a job like yours to do?
I love what I do – being part of the technology and VMware community is something I really enjoy. It’s also a great time to be at HP. When I originally started blogging, I had a lot of “old school” product managers tell me that blogging was a waste of time. I had a strong intuition that it was an important medium and along with Twitter, I stuck to it.
That’s my biggest piece of advice – social media success doesn’t happen overnight, over the weekend, in a month, or even a year. It really takes time, consistency and passion. With time, consistency and passion, you can be successful at anything you set your mind to do.
