Joining 5nine Software as Director of Product Management

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Today, I am excited to announce I will be joining the awesome team at 5nine Software as Director of Product Management. My primary job responsibilities will be for the product strategy and direction of 5nine’s security and management solutions.
5nineSo, you ask, why Product Management? It’s been a lifelong dream to be part of shaping the direction of a technology solution.  By joining 5nine, I hope to simplify IT, Cloud and beyond, because there’s always a better way 🙂

“What prepared me for this was very surprising looking back.”

Life at Nutanix

Over the past 2 1/2 years at Nutanix, I managed 84 partners over 146 solutions.  The partner solutions that my team managed and validated were from all aspects of technology. i.e. Monitoring, backup, DR, Big Data, DevOps, security, networking, databases and the list goes on.

5nine Software was one of my first partners I validated. I was familiar with them.  5nine Manager was a tool I had used in the field during my consulting days. But I had not seen security solution yet. During Nutanix Ready process, this is when I first got introduced to 5nine Security.  I remember at the time, I was super impressed with how they integrated with Hyper-V.

Shortly, after 5nine’s Nutanix Ready validation, my colleague and Alliance Manager Tommy Gustaveson and I interviewed past 5nine’s VP of Alliances Symon Perriman.  We enjoyed understanding 5nine’s vision and also getting to know a little more about Symon Perriman’s journey.  Yes, I admit, I had a little hero worship for him. But, who can blame me, Symon is a one of kind person and proud to this day to call him a friend 🙂

So, on with the story, part of my job at Nutanix was front-ending the Product Managers (PM’s). The PM’s were always pulled in 10 different directions and they came to trust us with some of these activities with partners.  This would include understanding the partner technology, how we can go to market together and how the partner would integrate with Nutanix.  We worked with Alliance Managers and PM’s to determine if this would be a good partnership.

Once the business side of alliances onboard s a partner, that’s where the handoff to the Nutanix Ready team happens. The team spends a lot of time understanding each partner solution(‘s). The team does a deep investigation of any issues around the partner solution(‘s) and Nutanix. This is vetted by Nutanix’s support and solutions teams. This, in turn, gives the customer a certain degree of comfort that the partner solutions were tested, validated and it will work on Nutanix 🙂

Over the course of my time at Nutanix and my career to that extent, I have to see many, many UIUX’s and engines (code) behind it.  I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. The common theme of what doesn’t work is over complicating your user experience.
We are at the age of managing multiple multi-geographic data centers and clouds, backups, DR, networking, SDN’s and we need to secure it all. If your UI even vaguely resembles an airplane cockpit, you’re doing it wrong.  It is an inefficient use of an IT Pro’s time and energy.  They just want to simply manage their production applications and have an easy management experience.

I will never trade the time I had at Nutanix, but times are a changing 🙂  As I’ve mentioned in a previous post “Building Nutnaix Ready”, “it was the best of times and the worst of times”.  I have not finished that series yet, but needless to say, it prepared me for the next step in my journey.

So, keep an eye on my blog, twitter feed, etc, because things are about to get into high gear.

Until next time and happy holidays,
Robert Corradini, MVP – Cloud & Datacenter

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