An IT Journey - Chapter 8

The last few months have been a little crazy. We had layoffs at Zerto and I took over supporting an additional Account Executive and additional territory. Overall, we ended up great as the overall territory was 171% of goal and my reps were at 110%. If we have Club again (we're supposed to be in the Bahamas in May), I should be there.

This article is to go over my 2 1/2 years at Savvis/CenturyLink (now Lumen). That job came out of the blue. I wasn't even looking for it, I just got a call one day. They immediately mentioned salary range, which was exactly where I knew I should be for the region. I was making about 30% less than I should be due to working at a smaller company. As long as everything was going good, I was satisfied, but it was not.

Savvis wanted to hire me for my cloud and datacenter experience, and it was a great fit. They were doing so many things right! I was excited that they had two-factor authentication in place, and that all administration was done from fully audited jump-stations. They actually had Tier 3 and Tier 4 Data Centers built to and operated to specifications.

Now as I later found out, everything wasn't perfect. The old SavvisStation still ran on an Access DB backend! But the systems and documentation standards in place were amazing. I started out supporting a single overlay seller, Beth (Weidemann) Nay. Her and I remain close friends to this day. We would work together again later at Zerto and HPE.

We started out as Enterprise and transitioned to Global and later, from an overlay to just CenturyLink, although all my checks always came from Savvis. CenturyLink, like many telecoms, saw their traditional business declining and was seeking to grow via acquisition. The problem is, they didn't really know what to do with the acquired companies and would quickly lose top performers as well as the lead those companies had diminished.

A guy who knew me from my ISG days, wanted me to go to work for Zerto, but the timing and pay was not right. About a year later however, CenturyLink decided to sell off it's Data Center business. By that stage, most of my time was spent just designing voice and data circuits, and that's not what I wanted to do. So the next time he called up, I looked into Zerto a little more, flew to Boston for an interview and that's where I have been ever since (minus an aquisition).