Zscaler

Commercial Sales Engineer, ME

Islam Channel

Presenter for the following programmes:

The Today Show
The Big Ramadan Show
The Dawah Project 
Recite Show
National Qira’ah Competition 
Hajj AM

Television Presenter

Cisco

Was aligned to Cisco distribution partners and served as a technical pre-sales professional across the Cisco product portfolio (Enterprise Networking (including routing, switching, Meraki, mobility,SDA, SD-WAN), Security, Collaboration, Data Centre). My role was to provide a cross-architectural perspective including speeding up adoption for software, services, and DevOps practices.

Key responsibilities:

-Strategically identifying and driving partner opportunities with distribution through technical enablement activities such as technical webinars, CXC (customer experience centre) events, design thinking workshops, architecture workshops, Proof of Value's (POV), and roadmap updates, to ensure partner's short term technology decisions align with long-term goals. 
-Technical advocate engaging with sales (account managers and business development managers), engineering, product management, and business unit to ensure our mutual success 
-Use my customer intimacy skills to influence key stakeholders in technical teams and drive technical solutions discussions and long term technology strategy 
-Develop technical champions in partners by demonstrating strong understanding of networking and security architectures and engaging in technical discussions with architects of partners.
-Differentiating and positioning Cisco solutions from their competitors using necessary use cases
-Ensure partners are fully supported with the necessary resources to be successful.

Systems Engineer, Partner & Developer Advocacy 

During my time on the Cisco apprenticeship programme I have:

-Rotated in various roles across my three years (listed in my experience) 
-Participated in The Outwards Bound Trust in person soft skills experience 
-Graduated with a first class honors in BSc in Digital and Technology Solutions 
-Obtained multiple Cisco certifications listed in my certifications. 
-Supported various careers fairs promoting technology and STEM in schools such as the BT technology careers fair in Adastral Park, Ipswich.

Cross-Functional Degree Apprentice

-Supported commercial UK&I customers with pre-sales product portfolio queries 
-Managed account heat maps of commercial south customers to identify opportunities from existing end of life (EOL) equipment in a customers infrastructure across the Cisco portfolio.
-Demoed some capabilities from the collaboration portfolio to customers, including control hub.
-Supported customer escalations
-Learnt about ThousandEyes and DNA-C

Commercial Pre-Sales Systems Engineer Apprentice

CSAP is a global graduate program that provides young professionals with a year-long curriculum of sales & technical training, on the job experience, field shadowing, mentorship and exposure to Cisco culture and values. 

-Completed the technical 6 months bootcamp for the ASE (Associate Systems Engineer) pathway for the Cisco product portfolio as part of my rotation for the apprenticeship programme. 

Bootcamp comprised of the following modules:

Cisco Webex Calling Design
Collaboration Tech Enablement
Customer Engagement Practice
CX (Customer Experience)
DC Tech Enablement
Demonstrating Programmable Solutions
Design Thinking
HyperFlex & ACI In Action
Integrating Security Solutions
Intro to Coding and APIs
IOT
LAN Tech Enablement
Meraki Tech Enablement
Mobility Tech Enablement
Presentation Skills
Recurring Offers
Security Learning Lab
Security Tech Enablement
WAN Tech Enablement
Components of a Network
Intro into Cisco sales
Professional and Leadership Skills

CSAP (Cisco Sales Associate Programme) 

-Attended Cisco Live conference in Barcelona in January 2020 to meet partners.
-Visited various partner sites (CDW, SCC) with aligned SEs to shadow and support engagements such as call out days and technical enablement sessions. 
-Shadowed other systems engineers and architects on strategic partner discussions and enablement 
-Supported partner queries regarding Cisco portfolio via Webex

Partner Systems Engineer Apprentice

Case management and help desk phone answering partner queries on partner programmes, locating account managers, incentives, connecting partners with specialist teams such as global virtual engineering (GVE).

-Visited partner sites like ComputaCenter and WWT to gain an understanding of tier 1 partners
-Generated Cisco Ready Reports for partners
-Attended CRN Awards 2019

Partner Sales Desk Apprentice 

Undertook a lab administrator role for Cisco CX Labs in EMEAR (Reading, UK) supporting various customer test beds while adhering to SLAs (service level agreements):

-Racking, stacking, and tearing down testbeds 
-Base configuration (IOS/NX-OS) for new test beds
-Inventory tracking using eITMS (devices, modules, hardware, tools and their location in the lab)
-Troubleshooting layer 1 and layer 2 connectivity 
-Traffic generation (Spirent, Ixia, Pagaent) 
-Installing / Upgrading software across a variety of Cisco hardware platforms.
-Cabling network topologies for SVS engineers
-Handling day to day VMWare vSphere operational tasks such as installing virtual machines and operating systems for testbed usage. 

I was also part of the Lab infrastructure upgrade ACI project:

Old lab:
-Old top of racks were not standardised so in terms of config, software, and platform. 
-EoR have low bandwidth, takes time.

New lab upgrade:
-First CX Lab to use ACI for infrastructure 
-ACI deployment for automated lab infrastructure
-Real-Time Visibility and Application Health Score.
-One config for every row.

CX-Labs Administrator Apprentice 

-Shadowed account managers on customer calls and customer site visits 
-Learnt about the Cisco CX renewals lifecycle model
-Joined weekly forecast calls to learn about pipeline

Enterprise Account Manager Apprentice 

MUFG

Introduction to investment banking and capital markets

Work Placement

Freelance, self-employed

ActionScript 2.0, PHP, MySQL, HTML, JavaScript

Game Developer

French Tutor

Freelance Game Blogger

Xchanging

End user support

-Imaging corporate laptops (Windows OS)

I am deeply enthused by learning new skills and being at the forefront of innovation for new emerging technologies. I love presenting technologies to clients and helping them solve and implement their complex technology challenges. I am someone who demonstrates empathy by listening to others, being inquisitive, working well with my co-workers, and taking feedback as a gift, so I can continue developing and be the best version of myself. 

If you catch me outside of work, I'm a spontaneous adventurer who loves travelling and exploring the world.

Taplio

Ayoub K's Linkedin Analytics

Ayoub K

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Taplio

.css-1jgreyo{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39,43,72,1) 0%, rgba(33,47,183,1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}Ayoub K's Linkedin Analytics

Ayoub K

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Ayoub K's Linkedin Analytics