Farewell Atos – Hello….

This blog should have come out last week but…

A little over two years ago, I decided to join Atos as a Cloud Architect. People who follow me will know that my last few career decisions have been mainly influenced by the need to care for my parents. My role at Atos allowed me to work from anywhere which was incredibly useful when my dad became hospitalised for a while. That role allowed me to be at the hospital; working and caring for him at the same time, with the help of my incredible wife.

Working from home can, however, have unintended consequences. Despite my best efforts, I was not getting as much physical movement during the day as I should have had. Being in cloud engineering meant that there was always a lot going on, not to mention the meetings. In addition to that, there were times when I didn’t see anyone besides my own family for weeks.

My dad passed away towards the latter part of last year. For some reason, my coping mechanism was to drown myself into even more work, which didn’t help with my lack of physical movement or social interaction. There were a few other negative side-effects as well. In short, all of this started affecting my health and I realised that something had to change.

I discussed the situation with my wife and we both agreed that I needed to find a job that allows me more physical activity and social interaction. I’ve been blessed so much that when I started looking, two opportunities came up in quick succession and both were very attractive in different ways. Despite going to the final stage, the first one didn’t work out so I won’t bore you with that story.

You can tell that the other one did work out well. Alex Galbraith has been a good friend for many years and works at Rackspace. He knows what I am like and being at Rackspace, he thought that the Rackspace culture and I would be a good match. They were looking for Solution Architects to join their team and I was interested in continuing with my goal of becoming a well-rounded cloud architect. Rackspace is multi-cloud enabled and focussed on customers’ needs – exactly the traits I was looking for.

Needless to say, that after a few good interview sessions, I accepted the position of Solutions Architect at Rackspace. I will be working in their Enterprise segment where my focus and experience has been over the years. I know I should have posted this last week when I started but I came back from Las Vegas late on Sunday evening and went straight into the new job the next morning (talk about being jet-lagged and a half!) But as they say: Better late than never!

I’ll be travelling to Rackspace offices in Hayes almost every day initially as meeting people face-to-face aids in building rapport quickly. However, there is flexibility available for me to work from home on some days of the week and that keeps my care side going as well. All that means a good balance between travel and family life while also meeting new people and customers.

I am already working on getting my community involvement and blogging back to normal but hopefully, this role will allow me to do that more and be present at more events. Last week was all about joining Rackspace and the famed orientation days but now, I am very excited about what’s to come next and looking forward to meeting new customers and solving their problems.

Now, if I could just download all that information into my head Matrix-style!