Once I learned the power of speaking up and advocating for myself, the doors of opportunity opened wide—and never closed. VMware reflects and encourages this philosophy, and that’s one of the big reasons I love working here as a colleague support engineer.

As the leader of the global Audio-Visual team at VMware, I try to infuse my team members with the same passion, energy, and enthusiasm I have for developing meaningful and progressive technology solutions that support our global meeting and event experiences. These efforts ultimately break down barriers created by physical distance, cultural communication, diversity, and personal limitations. And I love connecting people with the technology that enables a more productive experience.

As a database architect at VMware, I take a straightforward approach to challenges. I’m endlessly curious about the root cause of any problem—from disaster recovery to designing highly available architecture—and how IT can solve it in the simplest, most efficient way. I care about this because enterprises tend to overcomplicate solutions rather than look at the big picture of how customers actually use the technology. This can lead to delivering quick fixes instead of long-term answers and prevention.

The key components to managing technology change are delivering quality IT processes at speed, eliminating redundant/time-consuming tasks, reducing overhead and doing it all securely. That’s a big part of my job as Senior Manager, IT Applications. But another significant part is helping DevOps become an organizational/cultural change agent. And that’s what makes what I do so exciting—I get to both create change solutions and shepherd them to make employees/external customers as efficient and productive as possible.

On paper, I use machine learning and micro-services to ensure internal/external end users are their most productive. But I’ve discovered that what truly drives innovation, better solutions and better products is a passion and curiosity for the work. I actually love coming to work (!) as a Member of Technical Staff, Emerging Technologies, knowing I can think out of the box to make things simpler, easier, and even more fun so people enjoy the technology instead of resenting it.