It is no secret that I bleed blue for Dell. This is actually my second merry-go-round with Dell Technologies.

I actually first started with Dell in early 2000’s when Dell was expanding to new US campuses.

I had a couple starts and stops with my career after college and before Dell. It was the right time and place that I finished a couple IT certifications and Dell came into town hiring a large number of fresh new hires for small and medium business sales reps. Back in those days SMB owners would recieve Dell catalogs in the mail and sometimes there was an actual wait time for people calling in for the latest Dell specials on PCs and notebooks.

Honestly, I am not best sales guy most of the time. I’ve had my moments that I was the top performer and worked as hard as anyone else on the phone queue. I’ve never been the sales rep to know because of who I know, I’ve been known for what I’ve know about the first three layers of the OSI model. (Physical, Data Link, and Network.) It is my mix of personality with technical background that allows me to use DADD: discover, analyze, design, and defend IT networked solutions. I was internally promoted from inside sales rep to technical sales rep. I specialized into networking and security technical sales roles over the first decade of sales experience with Dell.

I’ve not been as successful as many of my sales peers over the years… My career stability and work balance has been as good as anyone elses that I’ve compared myself too. I left Dell for a bigger pay check and to try to find my local niche in the Ethernet game.

I left Dell to sell Cisco through a Value Added Reseller that is no longer around. Hind sight is 20/20. They head hunted me (and a handful of other Dell hopefuls) as a last ditch effort to find new customers in a saturated field and offset a large expensive project (with office’s biggest and best customer) that went sideways.

After that house of cards fell, I had a hard reset of priorities. I studied and passed the CCNA and decided to get paid for what I know and not who I know. I got a job in front line tech support. I was willing to pay my dues and climb the ladder again but from the operations side of the house. (front line tech support take all the perverbial beatings and don’t get paid enough) An old Dell boss of mine saw me working tech support queue and offered me a chance to sell Dell Networking again.

And so dear reader, this author has been selling pallets of 32, 48, and 64 port Ethernet datacenter switches loaded into a Dell semi truck until the present.

Starting my second time at Dell cloud was still in infancy. There was questions like, “What is the cloud?” So I also studied and sold lots of VMware archtecture on Dell hardware. I’ve worked with some of the largest datacenters for scale-out spine and leaf workloads that connect to PowerFlex and/or PowerScale+Object scale. I’ve had more than enough to try to keep up with on the on-prem repatriation to cloud costs conversation before Broadcom decided to purchase VMware. Now there is another couple of shifts happening in the industry.

Ai architecture is taking all of the RAM and hypervisor environments are primarily moving to container based software instead of VMs. No longer is there one software ecosystem for all the consoles that are needed to run an enterprise environment today. Instead of it being 1 Vendor that provides the single dashboard with all the tools, It is now log into your cloud of choice’s console and start building your own dashboard and connect it to other consoles. (Rinse and repeat)

I am here for it and looking forward to being apart of the human element that helps AI create new software defined architectures built on industry standards hardware. I’ve said many a time on many calls that we are building something that is tip of the spear for enterprise architectures.

Above image is a proposal of today’s air-cooled AI architecture. We are interconnecting 16 Nvidia GPUs with 800Gbps connections. 1.6Tbps Ethernet is right around the corner with InfiniBand trail blazing this speed.