Once (maybe twice) in your professional life you are presented with a great opportunity. Sometimes you understand the opportunity going into it, other times you realize a few years later what a great opportunity you stumbled upon. When I joined Aelita Software in the fall of 1999 I had no idea the of the opportunity I had stumbled upon. Up until that point I had been doing mostly administration work around Lotus Notes and then later Microsoft (NT, Exchange, Desktop, Server), supporting an office of 60+ people here in Columbus. I started searching for a new job using the standard job sites and I found a position I had never heard of at a company I had never heard of: Sales Engineer for Aelita Software. The interview process was interesting to say the least but what really hooked me was the technology. I had been involved in a NT 4 domain consolidation project using another company’s software…when I saw the corresponding Aelita product, I was blown away by the speed and simplicity. I joined Aelita as the 2nd SE and it was the start of a great ride that culminated with Quest Software purchasing Aelita in the spring of 2004.

Fast forward a few years to 2007 and low and behold the old Aelita team had gotten back together to form Veeam Software. While I may not have realized the great opportunity initially at Aelita, I knew the opportunity at Veeam and it was really a non-decision for me to be part of it. I joined Veeam as the SE manager (and only SE at the time) and got to work building a team of SE’s that I can say are some of the best SE’s in the industry. As typical for startups, the people who join early usually end up wearing multiple hats and that’s no exaggeration for me. I found myself doing a number of different things: hiring and managing SE’s, product management, marketing, social media, sales, etc. In the past few weeks I’ve also done 99% of all the SureBackup briefings with analysts, press, bloggers and Veeam employees…the number of calls/presentations is somewhere around 40.

Getting to the point…

After that too long introduction, my point is that I’ve been given another great opportunity here at Veeam. Starting today I’ll be known as the Senior Director of Product Strategy. I’m very excited with this new role as it will allow me to interact with all the departments here at Veeam but also interact more closely with our partners, press, analysts and community with much more focus than I previously had time for. Many of you already know me more as VMDoug and less as the Director, Global Systems Engineer Group so the nice thing is that to the outside world this move is pretty transparent.

I’m also very happy to announce that taking my place on the SE side of things will be David Siles, aka dsiles, Veeam’s own vExpert and all around super-smart individual. David has been filling the role as Enterprise SE for North America for the past year and his new role will give him a global focus. I’m very happy to pass the torch to David as the new Director, Worldwide Technical Operations.

The final announcement today is something that’s been brewing for the past quarter. Ricky El-Qasem, aka rickyelqasem, will be Veeam’s new Director of Educational Services. Ricky came to Veeam from a UK distributor where he was responsible for training and has trained many of the current UK VCP’s. Ricky has done an outstanding job as an SE and now he gets to focus his energies on creating Veeam University and making sure that our channel partners and customers have the best training curriculum available.

I know both David and Ricky understood the opportunity when they came to Veeam and I’m happy to see them take advantage of it and move into these new roles. As for myself, expect to see me pick up my travels again this month as I get out there and spread the word about Veeam and the great products and people we have here.

Thanks,

Doug Hazelman
Senior Director, Product Strategy