An IT Journey - Chapter 9

HPE shuts down for the last week of the year, so I thought it would be a good time to catch up my story about the past several years at Zerto. HPE acquired Zerto for about $400 million just a little over a year ago.

About a year into my employment at Savvis/CenturyLink (now Lumen), an acquaintance reached out to me about coming on at Zerto as an SE. I wasn't looking for work and not ready to move on, but briefly looked into the opportunity. One problem was, they weren't paying what I was making at the time, making it even easier to say no. However, about a year later and CenturyLink continued to implode Savvis and what they had hired me for. CenturyLink decided to sell off all the Data Center assets. So when Paul A Schmidt reached out to me again, I flew out to Boston for an interview and landed the position of pre-sales SE at Zerto. A position which I would hold for the next 6 years.

Zerto was a lot of fun, challenging and had great pay and benefits. It was definitely a work hard, play hard type of environment. We had quarterly sales meetings hosted somewhere in the US and annual Sales Kick Off (SKO) events in Mexico or the Caribbean. And then a new leader decided to also implement President's Club (ZClub) for top performers which I got to attend the first one in St. Kitts and Nevis in 2018 along with my wife. Truly a great time!

I started covering Paul's territory of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri. Over time, the territory got subdivided with a seller in St. Louis for Iowa and Missouri. The problem was, a seller with reduced territory and higher number couldn't make it and we saw turnover and layoffs. And still I survived, sometimes supporting sellers for additional markets and helping onboard and mentor new SE's.

I got to meet some great folks, supporting Mark Jackson , Anthony Johnson and Michael Beatty . After Paul left, I reached out to a former AE (account executive) that I worked with at Savvis, Beth Weidemann Nay and she came on board for a while. Then we hired Tonya Phillips, MBA who got promoted to Regional Sales Director this last year. And now I have been supporting Shawna Mullen this year. Along the way I also supported some great folks on a temporary basis like Mark Antonaccio and Kevin McDermott .

Funny thing is, Beth ended up at HPE, as well as some folks from my ISG days, Brad Hoffman , Shawn Godinez and Michael Whitaker to name a few. I'm sure I forgot someone(s) on this list, please forgive me (you might get added back in on a later edit if you call me on my BS :).

Companies use Zerto to help reduce data loss and downtime. We focus primarily on Disaster Recovery and Migration use cases. As always, change is constant, the tech landscape continues to evolve, and there are new uses cases and new platforms.

One thing I have learned over time is to spend 3 to 5 years in a job function or place of employment and it's time to move up or out. If not, you are getting screwed on pay or reducing your ability to move if you lose your job. The good news is, a new position opened up and I got the promotion to SE Manager, Public Sector for the Americas and Asia-Pacific starting January 2023. I work with a great bunch of people and work for a great company that is making money and has money in the bank. 惠普企业服务 is making smart decisions about the business that I believe will help them continue to improve over time. I'm looking forward to the next iteration of My IT Journey.