By Chris Reily, Director of Solutions Architecture
Well, with the holidays upon us, I find myself in the position of having to figure out what to buy for the solutions architects this year to thank them for another great year in 2013. If you think buying gifts for Aunt Emily, Cousin Jimmy or dear old Dad is hard – try picking out gifts for one of the most exacting, technical, opinionated and outstanding group of guys you’ll ever get to know. I missed black Friday and Cyber Monday so here goes nothing…
Nick P – Practice Manager, Networking
A 48oz. bottle of Bluebeard’s Beard Wash AND some SDN (software defined networking) with Cisco Open Network Environment Platform Kit (onePK) so he can finally have comprehensive Cisco network intelligence.
Randy B – Enterprise Architect
A relaxing massage chair AND a smart phone that is truly smart, does email, contacts and a calendaring that works as well as a vintage BlackBerry. It need to hold a decent charge to last a full work day AND reminds Randy of important appointments not to be missed. Or maybe he just needs a copy of VMware View!
Harris H – Solutions Architect, Data Center
An industrial size vacuum sealer for packing homemade jerky AND a quality Cloud as a Service offering to distribute to all those in need of new technology. And it would be just wrong not to provide a great way to manage it all with CMaaS!
Randy W – Practice Manager, Data Management
A case (okay, maybe just a bottle) of 1989 Chateau Petrus Bordeaux AND some super-fast hybrid flash storage like Nimble’s C250G (oh how Randy loves 10 gig networking).
Mark H – Solutions Architect, Data Management
A St. Croix Legend Bass fishing rod AND an EMC VNX5400 array. Plenty of fast disc to store and access plenty of hi-resolution photos of all the fish he can catch.
Francis C – End User Computing, Practice Manager
A Max Brooks signed copy of The Zombie Survival Guide AND a high quality technical manual for Citrix Xen Desktop 7!
John D – XaaS Consulting Architect
Cross country saddle bags for a BMW R-1200GS motor bike AND a ticket to London to meet Sharon Taylor,ITIL Chief Examiner, for lunch.
Chris C – Solutions Architect, Data Center
A Gillette Mach-3 Razor AND a converged data center (virtual computing platform) courtesy of Nutanix. Chris is keeping it simple in 2014 by combining storage, compute and networking in a single platform.
Joel G – Solutions Architect, Microsoft Solutions
An Air Force Academy sweatshirt AND an Azure environment managed by System Center 2012 R2. Who doesn’t want infrastructure provisioning, infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, automation and self-service in the New Year?
Ralph K – Practice Manager, Unified Communications
A Harley Davidson leather jacket AND a Cisco Jabber Client. So when Ralph is ready to hit the open road, he can unchain himself from the office but stay in touch by video and voice.
Chris W – Our CTO
Front row tickets to see Metallica in Germany next summer AND a guest appearance on TLC’s NY Ink, on which a talented artist Megan Massacre will create and complete an original tattoo design incorporating the logos of VMware, Cisco and EMC on Chris chest. He’s one dedicated dude.
As an IT professional, what’s on your holiday wish list this year? My gift to you? Here’s a free ebook on how organizations can take advantage of behavior emerging in the market for IT services.