After almost a decade at PQR, I have the opportunity to turn in the good for the best. 

Today, September 1^st is the first day after a long and rewarding chapter of my life at PQR. In 2009 I started at PQR as an Application and Desktop Delivery Consultant, focusing on Microsoft and Citrix solutions. As a consultant I had the opportunity to further develop my skills, both my technical as well as soft-skills. To me it was a revelation that my employer, PQR, invested in developing these soft-skills. Training on presentation skills, feedback, writing proposals, innovate like a startup and communication are all examples of topics PQR focusses on with their employees.

Non matter what role I fulfilled at PQR as a Sr. Consultant, Solutions Architect or Technology Officer, the teamwork made it all possible. The social and collegial culture of the organization has been the most important ingredient to success. Although each and every one at PQR is a professional, teamwork is the key ingredient. I look back at great projects, projects that seemed impossible in a timely fashion, but we nailed it, each and every time. The rush you experienced when all the effort put into a tender which we won, the IT Galaxy events which were a great success every time. All awesome experiences to remember and I probably forgotten a few more.

I want to thank all colleagues, partners and perhaps most important, all customers for everything I was able to achieve with all if you!

 

But now, even better things.

First of October I’ll start as a Sr. Solutions Architect Professional Visualization (ProVis). It isn’t a secret I always loved the technology and solutions NVIDIA provides. Professionally my first encounter was with some Quadro cards and Citrix HDX 3D Pro. Later on, in 2013 the first tech preview of NVIDIA GRID, the first GPU virtualization solution. The ability to deliver a virtual desktop without poor graphics or finally being able to deliver powerful virtual desktops for GPU demanding applications was amazing. The technology opened up new opportunities. All of a sudden engineers, architects and designers scattered around the world where able to collaborate with their massive assemblies without the need to wait on file synchronization processes. No longer mistakes were made due to the fact people worked with outdated versions of an assembly. Immediately we saw the opportunities and focused. Together with colleagues we helped a lot of customers and created a lot of content via blogs, videos and presentations. This also brought me to NVIDIA GTC 2015 in San Jose where I had the opportunity to present a customer case. Although this presentation was a milestone on itself, the GTC conference on itself was a highlight. A completely new world opened up to me and it became clear to me this was literally the future. The presentations I attended on AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning where amazing. I really got exited with all the developments GPU’s where fueling.

Ever since these awesome NVIDIA encounters I have been advocating the technology and solutions. This resulted into a various NVIDIA related presentation, a lot of content, a great Elite Partnership between PQR and NVIDIA and the first DGX-1 in The Netherlands and TeamRGE. I have met great professionals and got elected to be part of the NVIDIA vGPU Community Advisor where I met even more professionals.

So, as a Sr. Solutions Architect ProVis I’ll be focusing on these great NVIDIA technology and solutions even more. I’ll will help customers and partners on Quadro, Virtual Reality, Advanced Rendering and Graphics Virtualization (vGPU/GRID) AI and Deep Learning related opportunities. I’m looking forward to work with a new team of proud and exceptional professional at NVIDIA. New opportunities and developments will certainly arise and I’m looking forward to learn. Can’t wait to get started.

Naturally, you can expect new content will certainly be added to my blog site in the near future

IT IS!

 

Every once in a while I receive the question, “Why should I use ShareFile if I already got OneDrive for Business”.
Out of a natural habit, I always respond “It depends”. That’s perhaps the most common answer in IT and also the safest one, at least for the IT pro. Nevertheless, I want to address this question and its dependencies in this blog post.

Why do we need Content Collaboration tools in the first place?

First of all, why do people ask this question? Well, people need tools to safely synchronize data across their variety of devices and perhaps more importantly, they need to collaborate with each other. Sharing data with content collaboration tools are indispensable. Working, simultaneously, on the same document is a clear example of driving productivity and meeting user expectations on how we, as human beings, like to digitally collaborate when it comes to data. The need for secure content collaboration tools is a fact. At first, we started to use synchronization tools in our private lives, very convenient with all our devices. Later on, we started to share them with relatives and friends. All these consumer style solutions really helped us and made our lives easy. A lot of us, myself included, started thinking “Why don’t we use these solutions at the office?”. And so, we did. A great example of Consumerization of IT, as we introduced consumer solutions (e.g. Dropbox, OneDrive, WeTransfer) into the enterprise world. Organizations recognized these shadow IT initiatives and addressed the challenges. Enterprise File Sync and Share solutions (e.g. Citrix ShareFile, Box, Egnyte) were implemented.