Polyvalent Ltd.

Polyvalent - having or using a lot of different forms or features

Polyvalent is a company that provides both go-to-market consultancy services (sales, marketing, technology, etc.), and also builds SaaS products that assist in these go-to-market activities (social media advocacy, solution selling, etc.). We are a bootstrapped company that focuses on user impact & benefit instead of share-holders.

Founder

Kranz household

Duties include project management, damage limitation, education, travel logistics, mentoring, tantrum avoidance (~50% success rate), food preparation, supply chain management (trip and holiday organisation). Successfully made president's club each year (father's day and anniversary cards), although never received a pay rise. Managing a complex P&L budget. Work for an outstanding group of bosses, although multitasking between them is often challenging. Would not change this position for the world!

Father & Husband

Sysdig

Building and delivering enablement content for the worldwide sales team. Helping teams ramp quicker, be more effective sellers, deliver better outcomes and helping out customers reach effective solutions.

Director of Technical Enablement

Helping the EMEA team to focus on what matters most: helping our customers get confidence in running containers securely in production.

EMEA SE Manager

EMEA Principal Sales Engineer

Datamancers Ltd.

Managing Director

Vocalink

Working within a team of DevOps experts building transformation capabilities to support Containers, VMs, automation, monitoring, logging and other components. Effectively building an internal private cloud to support Agile development within the business, CI/CD and rapid prototyping. Working with the team to evaluate and implement various tooling, including Rancher, Kubernetes, Elastic Search, Prometheus / Grafana, Ansible, Jenkins, Nexus and others. Working closely as part of the product management team with daily interactions and co-working with the DevOps engineers, as well as involvement in the wider business for requirement gathering, product demonstrations and on-boarding.

Product Management (Contract)

Hedvig Inc.

Hedvig has brought to market a truly unique storage solution. As with most software-defined solutions we are of course scale-out, but what makes us unique is the ability to scale-out as an active/active/active cluster across multiple physical (and logical) locations, including public clouds. All this from an enterprise tier-1 storage platform.

My role at Hedvig is to help our customers and potential customers get the most out of SDS with Hedvig, replacing DR or HA with DR & HA. Our unique solution often means planning out how the existing infrastructure can be gradually evolved to be more cloud like, with applications being accessible and active from any site. Infrastructure and Application Architecture is key to making any modern IT transformation project a success.

Solutions Architect

Covéa Insurance

Assisting the team with the design, deployment and transition of a new infrastructure to support a new business initiative. Working with VMware, Tegile, Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus, Zerto and Veeam with lots of PowerShell. PowerShell automation work both for environment automation and auditing / health checks, integrating across various APIs and modules (including F5, RabbitMQ, Active Directory, VMware and a few others).

Technical Architect and Engineer (Contract)

Kranz Ltd.

We work with businesses of all shapes and sizes, at all levels. Our main focus is helping people better understand what technology can do for their business and how they can adapt their own skills to stay relevant to both the business and the latest technology. We can help build an IT or cloud strategy, assistance with writing and running tenders (RFP, ITT, etc.), data centre and cloud migration, application refactoring and modernising IT infrastructures. 

Our passion is IT excellence and we work with our customers to ensure this is delivered in the most cost effective way. Our consultancy is available on both short term and long term engagements. Our aim is to spend the time making sure our customers end up being fully self sufficient.

Independent Consultant

LateRooms.com

Brought on to assist with several transformation projects within the business, including driving data centre efficiencies, strategic use of IaaS (both private and public), unified communications, PCI-DSS, Active Directory consolidation and other projects. Assisted in setting standards for consumption of AWS cloud services, as well as migrating specific services into Route 53, EC2 (for development and disaster recovery) and S3. Worked closely with the contact centre team to select, negotiate and migrate to a cloud telephony platform, including a fully managed IVR, ACD and secure credit card handling.

Spent a lot of time working across the business, selecting and working with stake-holders in building project documentation and business cases to be presented to the board. Working closely with the project management team to refine business cases and project planning. Lots of involvement with the DevOps community in streamlining the transition from code to infrastructure, working alongside Go and Chef pipelines to enable a much quicker delivery framework. Initial investigations into containerisation of code within wrappers like Docker. Small amount of Node.JS and bash coding to automate AWS services.

Infrastructure Architect  (Contract)

Kelway

Kelway are rapidly becoming one of the UKs leading system integrators / value-added resellers. In addition to the very successful fulfilment business, in 2011 they committed to growing in the services and solutions areas and I was employed to help develop and build this. Working across multiple technologies including a primary storage focus on HDS, EMC, HP, IBM, Dell and NetApp solutions, with VMware, Cisco, VCE, Citrix, Redhat and Microsoft virtualisation and Cloud solutions. I was responsible for working on some of the key accounts within Kelway and working closely with the projects team to assist these customers through various programmes of change. Many customer meetings were focused around white boarding the different solution options available with little preparation and ensuring that the customers' requirements were clearly recorded and met by any solution proposed. This in turn developed into designing the project and ultimately becoming the technical design authority during the implementation.

As Practice Lead I directly manage around 10 Solutions Architects, ensuring they have the focus to work on customer projects and that their lives are as simple and worry free as possible! Not always a direct management role as the team are very self sufficient but mainly acting as a firewall to keep politics and problems away from them. I regularly arranged team events, set the strategy and gave individuals training and business objectives to complete. Assisting where appropriate with projects and workload to maintain the teams high quality and profitability to the business.

Practice Lead

I love this industry because it's constantly innovating and changing, which means I need to help those I work with to stay at their best. I work to make help end-users can get the best out of their cloud, Kubernetes, OpenShift, GKE, EKS, etc. container environments and support applications securely and confidently in production use.

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