Let me start by wishing you all a happy new year! I hope you had great holidays and just like me, you are fully charged to kick off 2020 with a big bang! A big bang, in my case, means that as of today I will start in a new role at ITQ Consultancy as Technologist with a focus on End-User Computing (EUC), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT). In this post, I would like to explain why the change and why the focus on these topics.

In the past 3 years, I have been part of a great team of creative people. Within our marketing team, I was responsible for Technical Marketing, and daily support with everything else. I am seriously proud of the things we achieved. Creation of content on all sorts of topics from VMware, Pivotal, AWS and NVIDIA, on all of our propositions with content such as our lightboard videos (sometimes including myself in the video), several whitepapers, news articles, blog posts, and don’t forget all of the events and stages I have been on to present about cool tech and projects. Also, things like the ITQ T-Shirts (like the Year of VDI shirts and the Storage Things shirts) have been a result of being able to fully unleash my creativity with such a great team of people.

My role also included a lot of hardcore marketing activities like lead generation, campaign management, budget management, and event management (which aren’t the things that energize me). And since we (as ITQ) have the ambition to grow, we also need a strong focus on these activities because they form the foundation of successful growth.

Success is a result of focus, that’s what I strongly believe. The stronger the focus, the better the success. And that’s what made me question my situation. On one hand, I had a focus on creating content and on the other, I was heavily involved in marketing stuff. Two completely opposite jobs, but both equally important. But, as I mentioned, ITQ is in the situation that we need to take marketing to the next level. That level requires much more structuring. In my opinion, creativity and structure are quite opposites in terms of competencies. That’s why I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t the right person anymore for the role I was in. Another reason is that my heart lies with EUC and for a couple of years as well with Artificial Intelligence platforms and IoT. VDI was a great segway for me to specialize in artificial intelligence and high-performance computing platforms as they both benefit from GPUs. Being able to work with some of the most awesome people from VMware, NVIDIA, ITQ, and costumers has taught me a lot and made me realize that I wanted to focus on that, and just that. IoT might sound weird in terms of focus, but like EUC, IoT is there to empower an employee. IoT can have a huge effect, and even on a broader scale. Hence the focus on IoT.

After some seriously great talks with our senior management, spanning over multiple months, we found a way for me to take the next step in my career and gain focus again.

Within the EUC, AI and IoT areas, I will be responsible for our vision and strategy, I will be working on creating technical, marketing, and sales content. I will continue to be part of the different communities and will increase focus on presenting at (technical) events. There are already some seriously awesome plans being developed and you will for sure take notice of some of these plans (and related content) quite soon!