As many of my colleagues have been posting, I too have jumped from an amazing company: Nexenta focusing on Storage and Virtualization to EarthLink, focusing on Cloud, Services and hosting. My role will be that of a Principal Solutions Architect, and I’ll be focusing in my region, primarily in the Midwestern area of the US.

I’ve been feeling lately that some of my more discrete skills, those of OpenStack, Cloud, and some of the networking pieces that surround these technologies have become less categorically a part of my portfolio, and that I’ve had to work on them privately as part of my lab work, as Nexenta is a storage company by nature. While their technology is astounding, and I’ll continue to promote them when the solution is logical, I’m now allowed to bring whatever solution makes the best sense to my customer base. This will afford me the opportunity to bring to my customer a range of technologies via an agnostic approach with an eye toward “Solutioning” significant and creative approaches to their needs that will allow us to help them in ways they may never have considered previously.

EarthLink provides more than just traditional hosting, incidentally. They started out as a basic DSL provider, who had a rock solid model. When the shakeups started happening, and all the providers began falling by the wayside, they knew that they’d have to modify their business model or they would fail as well. They did. They added talent, management skill, and acquired some phenomenal companies. One notable acquisition was CenterBeam. These folks also invented Hosted Exchange, as well as creating Active Directory alongside Microsoft. This one gives access to an advanced set of controls within the Microsoft Office 365 toolset allowing for a massive improvement on the standard set of webtools included within what Microsoft offers in the standard product.

I am thrilled to be part of this fantastic organization and this great team. And, I look forward to this new opportunity with excitement and not the smallest amount of healthy anxiety.

Stay tuned for upcoming details on some very cool offerings from this very dynamic and exciting company in future posts.