There is a lot to tell – first my professional journey..
I have had a LOT of jobs growing up, starting as a caddy at Shackamaxon Country Club in my hometown of Scotch Plains, New Jersey at the ripe old age of 14, and I really did not have a direction after college as to what I wanted to do. I did ambulance transport as an EMT for a while, and even briefly thought a career about medicine. I quickly decided that was not for me. I was even a certified Pinkerton Security Guard at one point, and had a cool badge and everything. I still have it somewhere.
I was later working at a Kinkos and I really liked helping out the desktop / computer rental guys with fixing some of the computers there. I had heard they were starting a new copy center at the staples up the highway, and I ended up helping start their desktop publishing department. I even helped design their logo at the time for the copy center. I was not and am not an artist at all, and realized I was more on the technical end of things. So I saved up and decided to go back to school, but this time I went to the Chubb Institute and got a degree in Network Engineering. This started me down a path in IT that had a lot of stops. I did desktop support for a few companies and managed a Novell 4.11 environment (I have said that I am old!) before moving on to the corporate world. I started at a helpdesk for a really big company that owned a bunch of others and moved up from answering phones to desktop support, and then the Manager of desktop support, before moving to the Engineering group – I remember that I was offered the job on my birthday, I think it was 2003 or 2004. While there, I learned virtualization and a lot about networking and storage and tape devices and lots of other useful stuff. I left there in 2008 and went to a smaller reseller, where I was the everything IT guy. I deployed Veeam for the first time there, and I believe it was version 6 or so at that point. I learned an amazing amount about so many different things there, and I did a few consulting jobs for them, and I realized that I liked doing that. I then moved on to a solutions provider called DynTek, where I delivered solutions with Veeam, VMware, (everything) Microsoft and a ton of different storage and hardware vendors. I then was an architect there, and after a few years I moved to a company called Presidio, in NJ. Here I designed and sold a lot of different storage solutions, as well as different protection solutions. I had always liked sizing and working with Veeam, and finally after almost 4 years there, I made the move to the vendor side for the first time. I have been with Veeam since 2018, and have had a few roles here. At the current moment I am a Senior Technical Partner Manager working with several of the major national partners out there – enabling, supporting and working with the talented engineers and architects that work with customers every day. When it comes to industry certifications, I have a literal plethora. From my first which was my MCSE in Windows NT4 (Did I say that I was old?) and my MCP in 95, as well as my CNA and CNE in 3.x, 4.x (Novell – that was a long time ago) to VMware VCP, Veeam VMCE 8,9,10,11 and VMCA, and in the middle were a lot of others – Dell EMCISA, Citrix, Cisco, Comp-Tia, Network+, etc. Then come the cloud certifications – I hold (or held, they expired) 3 associate AWS certs as well as basic Azure and GCP certs too. The initial point of this blog was to document my recertification with AWS, and show how to prepare for that journey, It sort of as morphed into what it is today.