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Introduction

Team Mission

The mission of the IBM Storage Solutions Team is to engage with strategic ISV and OEM vendors that are aligned with the IBM Storage strategy to create short- and long-term alignment of solutions roadmaps and GTM. The team will engage heavily with the entire IBM Storage portfolio, its product managers, engineers, and technologists, and those at other leading technology companies worldwide. Our primary intention is to realize measurable, material, incremental business for the Storage product team accredited to our joint in-market solutions with technology partners.

This group is comprised of technology and business professionals who are intent on bringing to market impactful customer solutions based on the IBM Storage assets of today and the future. It will have influence over the product roadmaps and will evangelize everything we have to offer to our partners, our clients, and the worldwide market broadly.

Your role and responsibilities

Primary Goals

The Storage Solutions Engineer will primarily be expected to:

· Design, develop, build, integrate, and test, validate, or otherwise certify differentiated workload-based solutions based on the IBM Storage portfolio of offerings combined with 3rd party technology from leading technology partners

· Contribute to defining clear requirements for the IBM Storage portfolio based on industry trends and key ISV and OEM partner strategies, in collaborative partnership with Storage Product Managers

· Educate the market on the critical vitality of IBM Storage to the successful deployment and performance of business-valued workloads

· Provide education to customers and sales regarding our storage solutions in a wide variety of formats (e.g., blogs, white papers, reference architectures, videos, industry social media, trade shows, on-site briefings, etc.)

· Drive client success stories, references, and joint marketing opportunities between IBM Storage and our technology partners

· Help foster the feeling of being a trusted advisor with our customers when it comes to strategic storage solutions

· Enable cross-selling of jointly developed storage solutions in the market

Typical Assignments

The Storage Solutions Engineer will have a variety of assignments, including:

· Engage in quarterly (or more frequent) roadmap discussions to understand future directions of each Storage Product Management team

· Evangelize IBM Storage capabilities with ISV and OEM vendors (technical partners)

· Create best practice POVs for our products, and services with strategic workloads

· Create meaningful content (e.g., whitepapers, videos, presentations, etc.), consumed by our selling community and clients, used to enable and accelerate solution selling

· Contribute to public events (e.g., speaking sessions, presentations, rounds tables, etc.)

· Contribute to technology partner interlocks (e.g., co-innovation sessions) and learning ISV and OEM vendor (technology partner) offerings in both technical depth and strength of understanding the business value, relevant markets, and competition

· Support client meetings to properly position storage solutions in client opportunities and helping to secure new business

· Discern the strategies and needs of the sales community, customers and clients, and technology partners to be an effective liaison to core product management for feature requests

· Work with technology partners to secure their support for our joint solution development efforts, understand clearly and completely their requirements for solution initiatives, and influence their roadmaps, secure HW, SW, MDF, etc.

· Research, learn, and train on the customer usage of technology partner workloads, endeavoring to know the workloads as well as the customers, if not better

· Contribute to the building of a 6- and 18-month roadmap for storage solutions

· Create industry social media enterprise credibility with direct content aligned to solutions work

Required education

Master's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

Desired Skills, Experiences, and Attributes

A strong candidate for the Storage Solutions Engineer position will possess a wide variety of skills, experiences, and attributes, including:

· Demonstrated skill in performing the typical assignments and in achieving the primary goals listed above

· Experience as a Solutions Architect, Technical Marketing Engineering, Corporate Systems Engineer, Technical Product Manager, Interoperability Test Engineer, Technical Sales Engineer, or similar role

· Discipline in program managing oneself and others to deliver on objectives

· Openness, transparency, and honesty with oneself and others as it pertains to intentions, objectives, plans, and execution

· A habit of facing and overcoming difficult technical and business challenges, or failing while putting forth one’s best effort, leaning, and forging on

· An innate desire to deeply learn new technologies and customer workloads with a strong understanding of the problems being solved and the business value derived

· A bias for action and results, viewing failure as necessary and educational

· Taking ownership of one’s tasks, contributing actively to projects and objectives, and understanding the impact of one’s performance on the team’s success

· A bias for exercising the principle of charity, interpreting the words and actions of others in the best, strongest, and most rational way possible

Preferred technical and professional experience

Technology Areas

It is expected that Storage Solutions Team members will be deeply familiar with at least a few relevant technology areas and broadly familiar with several others. Such technology areas (with example vendors and products) include:

· Enterprise Storage: IBM, Dell-EMC, NetApp, Pure, DDN, HPE, Ceph, etc.

· Hyperconverged Infrastructure: Nutanix, HPE SimpliVity, Dell-EMC VxRail, Cohesity, Red Hat, Pivot3, etc.

· Virtualization: VMware, MS Hyper-V, Nutanix AOS, Red Hat OpenShift, KVM, SUSE, Citrix, etc.

· AI/ML: Nvidia, IronYun, Data Monsters, etc.

· Data Protection: Veeam, Commvault, Cohesity, Rubrik, etc.

· Database: SAP, Oracle, MS SQL Server, Snowflake, IBM Db2, MS Access, MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, ELK, MariaDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, Databricks, OpenText (Vertica), EnterpriseDB, etc.

· Server Infrastructure: IBM, Dell-EMC, Lenovo, Cisco, Supermicro, etc.

· Hyperscalar / Public Cloud: Amazon AWS, Google GCP, MS Azure, etc.