Presales Solutions Architect

The role is a critical part of the team, working closely with the sales team as their technical partners in all phases of the sales process. This includes evangelizing and demonstrating technology to prospects, answering technical questions around solutions, and how they solve business problems. The team plays a vital role not only with regard to revenue generation, but also with the company's reputation in the marketplace. We are the frontline evangelists, the direct line to our customers.

This Job Is For You If

• You're interested in a meaningful job at a growing technology company where you'll work with a variety of technology solutions and be appreciated for doing your job well.
• When you see things that need improvement, you get working on a solution.
• You enjoy collaborating with highly skilled professionals with a passion for technology.
• You want to join a culture that embraces dynamic individuals with a focus on innovation.
• You're passionate about technology that crosses multiple functional domains such as compute, storage, data protection, business continuity, cloud, and automation.
  
  

A Day In The Life

• Align with appropriate sales geography to represent solutions – product, services, and manage services.
• Use deep knowledge of technology, products, processes, industry expertise, and consultative sales skills to assess and educate customers on the value of solutions.
• Use deep knowledge and understanding of main strategic partners to credibly and persuasively articulate the features and benefits of these products to the customer.
• Build in-depth knowledge of clients' technical and business priorities, challenges, and initiatives that can be translated into solution opportunities.
• Act as the technical lead on complex proposals; conduct final review, edit proposals, and approve technical content.
• Determine how industry trends, OEM roadmaps, and advances in technology may impact the customer.
• Develop successful relationships with the sales team, partners, and customers.
• Deliver quality documentation to support presales efforts, including solution Bill of Materials, Configurations, Visual Aids, and Proposals.
• Develop and propose technology solutions that meet customers' needs and functional requirements and are in alignment with customer strategy, delivery capabilities, and OEM partner relationships.
• Be available for some travel, typically 20% of the time or less, and typically limited to short-duration trips for customer appointments and longer trips for training and/or conferences.
  
  

Required Technical Skills

The ideal candidate will have deep experience in at least one solution set in each category that is within the parenthesis below. Not all are required but a typical candidate will have many of these categorical conversations.

• Server virtualization technologies (Vmware, Nutanix, KVM, RedHat OpenShift Virtualization Platform)
• Hyper-Converged Infrastructure solutions (VMware vSAN; Dell VxRail; HPE SimpliVity, dHCI; Nutanix)
• General Compute technologies, including Rackmount and Blade Technologies (HPE ProLiant, Synergy; Dell PowerEdge, MX; Cisco UCS, SuperMicro, Lenovo)
• Enterprise Storage technologies, including SAN, NAS, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, traditional vs. All-Flash (Dell Unity, PowerStore, Isilon, PowerScale; PowerFlex, Primera, Nimble, Alletra, Pure Storage)
• Data Protection technologies, including Backup/Restore, Replication, Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Archiving (Dell EMC Avamar, DataDomain, PowerProtect Data Manager, Networker, Commvault, Veeam, Zerto, Druva, Cohesity, Rubrik)
• Networking technologies, understanding the OSI model in particular to switch/route/dynamic routing. An understanding of the a product platform line is ideal (Dell Networking, HPE Aruba, Arista, Cisco, Juniper, Meraki) both wired and wireless.
• Public Cloud technologies (AWS, Azure, GCP) that primarily encompasses compute, storage, and network offerings.
  
  

Preferred Education / Experience

• Prior Experience as Pre-sales Architect/Engineer/Solutions Architect with a Channel Partner or OEM
• Professional Certifications: VMware VCP minimum and/or other OEM accreditations
• Prior "internal” (non Channel Partner or OEM) IT Experience
• ITIL / ITSM experience
  
  

Core Competencies

• Must have the ability to actively listen to others and articulate ideas verbally and in writing to any audience.
• Ability to think on your feet and articulate thoughts in an organized manner even when not prepared for the discussion or situation you are in.
• Demonstrate a willingness to embrace new systems, processes, technology, and ideas.
• Must be able to work effectively with those with different skill sets, personalities, or motivation levels to achieve a better team result.
• Thoroughly accomplish tasks with concern for all the areas involved.
• Build and maintain client satisfaction with the products and services offered by the organization; provides excellent service to the client.
• Build in-depth knowledge of clients' technical and business priorities, challenges, and initiatives that can be translated into opportunities in alignment with client strategy, delivery capabilities, and OEM partner relationships.
• Develop and maintain relationships with OEM peer resources.