This afternoon I finished my first week at Dell. Needless to say it was a bit of whirlwind, but hey, I haven’t quit yet :).
I spent the week trying to get set up — fighting with printers, getting used to Microsoft Vista, figuring out how to put my laptop to sleep etc. — as well as meeting with a slew of people who I will be working with going forward.
On Day 2 the Datacenter Solutions group, which I’m a part of, had their second half of the year kick-off. It was a good opportunity to see where the group has come from and where they’re going. This team has done/is doing some pretty impressive things with some of the world’s most humongous cloud providers.
The folks I met with were both within and outside the Datacenter team. Outside of the Datacenter folks, I met with analyst relations, PR, members of Dell’s social media team, a former Sun compadre and even randomly ran into and had lunch with a neighbor. I’ve been very impressed with how friendly and nice everyone’s been. It will take a little while to learn the subtleties of the culture but it seems to be pretty WYSIWYG.
Next week I’m in the office on Monday and then off with the Datacenter Solutions chief architect and a few people from Dell’s open source team to Cloud World/Open Source World/Next Generation Datacenter in San Francisco (the event formally known as Linux World). Dell has a keynote as well as a couple of talks and a booth. It will be a good opportunity for me to learn more about what Dell’s doing in the space as well as meeting with folks in the industry in my new role as Cloud Evangelist.
Let the wild rumpus start.

Teammate Drew, patent holder and product planner, who has the good fortune of sitting across the aisle from me.
Pau for now…
Dude…did you leave your firearms at home? Looking forward to seeing you next week in SF
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Hey Barton, congratulations on your switch to Dell! Looking forward to more cool things you do with Dell. If I were setting up a cloud, cost/server, would definitely lead me to Dell (duh, that’s why all my servers are from there *grin*)
-c
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Thanks Colin! And yes Steve, I have brought no firearms to work 🙂
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