Simon Grant, Senior Technical Architect at Trilogy Technologies, talks to us about his work
What is your main role in your job?
My job has two main elements. The first is consultancy and design around new installations and the second is the actual delivery of these designs for our clients.
The design and consultancy role is a very important one for me. Some of the design work will be in response to detailed tender requests but much of it involves working as a Technical Account Manager with our key clients.
I take technical ownership of the customer?s infrastructure and act as a ?trusted advisor?, making recommendations and giving advice on the direction their IT infrastructure should take to best match the business?s needs. The other element is the actual implementation of the designs.
I have delivered mission critical projects for customers in a broad range of sectors, from food manufacturers such as Largo Foods (home of Mr Tayto) to hi-tech Wellman International. This is a very exciting part of my job as I get to work with a variety of Trilogy clients.
What?s a typical day like?
I tend to start work from home at about 7.30am and plan what I am going to do before heading out to a customer site.
Depending on the client, I could find myself liaising with people from different backgrounds, from management to administrators, to ensure the project meets the needs of the organisation and the people who will be using it and/or implementing a technology infrastructure and disaster recovery solution in a virtual environment, working closely with the Trilogy team.
What are your areas of expertise and particular skills?
My main areas of expertise revolve around virtualisation, storage and active directory. Working with these technologies and using them to meet customers? business requirements is always satisfying.
The role of the Technical Architect is varied, so it requires a wide range of skills including:
- Good communication skills with clients ? listening and providing answers
- Up-to-date knowledge of technologies
- Strong problem-solving skills
- Good knowledge of quality standards and best practice
- Strong project management skills
- The ability to think ahead and anticipate problems, issues and solutions
Because I work from start to finish on each project, it is essential to understand all aspects of that project, from both a business and technical point of view.
This means having a full working knowledge of technologies such as VMware, Veeam, Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange, Cisco and many others and maintaining up-to-date qualifications for the above ? so learning is continuous.
My role is about understanding what each customer wants to achieve and building them a solution that best meets these requirements.
We regularly meet with our customers to review progress, so I keep the Trilogy Technical Services Manager constantly informed. Often calls logged through our support centre can indicate a need to begin the process of planning an upgrade ? more disk space, improved WAN links and so forth.
This is a very interesting process which has involved me in the entire lifecycle of some customers? infrastructure for many years.
What do you like best about your work?
As a techie I get great joy from unpacking new, shiny technology and from working with clients to meet their business objectives. Everything from improving a company?s mission critical systems resilience and availability, while at the same time reducing its carbon footprint to implementing a virtualized private cloud infrastructure and disaster recovery solution to future-proof and improve performance of a company?s IT environment.
Depending on where I am working and the traffic conditions I will often work on beyond 5.30pm ? but I try to be home by 7pm for bath and bedtime with my son.
Source: http://smartfutures.ie/2012/10/18/technical-architect-simon-grant/
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