No, the “dot” is not a typ-o, I’ll explain in a minute.

First let me take you back to the situation I found myself in about a year ago. I was working as a Technical Account/Adoption Manager (TAM) at VMware which had been acquired by Broadcom a year before that.

In my head, I was still a part of VMware and I was waiting it out to see what the acquisition by Broadcom would entail for both my customers, colleagues, partners and myself. In the end I found that I didn’t fit in the role/company and decided to leave. So on January 1st, I became officially unemployed.

I was very happy to be able to return to my previous employer, PQR, be it in a different role than what I left in 2021. I left as a consultant, to become a TAM at VMware, but I returned in the role of a Strategic IT Architect, as part of the pre-sales team. The role was crafted and seemed to fit exactly with both my own capabilities and my ambitions as well as those of PQR.

I loved being back. From the first contact after I decided to leave, up unto moment I am writing this. The close connections and the way people work at PQR gave me energy and joy. But (and you might have been waiting for this), there was a feeling of something that was missing.

As a TAM you are constantly working with a small number of customers. Building relations on a technical level and (help) shaping the future of the IT landscape for those customers. And thát was what I didn´t have at PQR.

Yes, I was talking to a lot of customers, but all these conversations were fairly superficial and mostly “one-offs”. Also the interactions I was used to with product management at VMware, shaping the future of the products, was something I was missing at PQR. Off course that’s one of the main differences between a vendor and a partner.

So in the end, I decided that I would look around to see how to fill the need I still felt. And round about that same time, I found an opening for a Technical Account Manager role at a different vendor that is, technologically, pretty close to VMware.

So after a couple of weeks of talking to different people within that organization, I have made the decision to join them. And so I am very happy to let you know that I will be starting as a TAM @Nutanix, on November 1st.

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Even though there is a lot of technological similarities between the companies, there are also quite a few differences. It is also a big leap to leave the VMware eco-system of which I have been a part for about 20 years and have been contributing to for the last 10. Both as a vExpert, vExpert Pro and as a VMUG Leader for the Dutch chapter.

Leaving this, feels a little like leaving a town you have lived in for a large part of your life, to move to a different town. And that is going to be hard, I will not deny or ignore this. But I tend to look at the positive and I am very excited to be back in the role I love to do, with a different company.

I do however hope to find a new community at Nutanix that will be just as warm and welcoming as the vCommunity at VMware has been.

Anyway, to all that took the time to read this and earlier blogs, thank you for being here. Thank you for reading my blogs and I will definitely continue writing them here. They will however cover different technology then you have been used to, for the past 10 or so years.

(for the people who don’t know, .Next is Nutanix’ technology event. So who knows, maybe I’ll see some of you there in the future!)