The first version of this blog was like “War-and-Peace” lengthwise! So I thought I’d better taper it down and here I am with some news about the changes I’m undergoing in my professional life.
Job change
No, I won’t bother you with the story of my work experience. I’ll keep it short, I promise!
Being a part-time blogger and a part-time analyst has been amazing, but in 2016 I started thinking about the next stage of my career. Not that it was necessary from the income standpoint… but I was looking for new challenges and, if possible, having even more fun!
I started Juku back in 2010 (with my friend Fabio, but he left for a real job in 2012). I got lot of positive feedbacks for a couple of years, then I started to realize that it could become a real job too. I accepted my first commissioned jobs (mostly white papers), more traveling, more fun and, again, more work to do… over time, I also (re)discovered that social media is cool, but meeting people face to face is still the best social networking experience ever.
Every now and then I would get spontaneous job offers but I wasn’t ready to leave this kind of lifestyle for a real job… besides, I didn’t think I was all that suitable for most of them either.
This time was different. I had the opportunity to meet these guys a couple of times… I got briefings and I started to fall in love with the technology (which was easy since it’s object storage!) and I finally got involved in a project which led me to get to know them better.
In November, when I made my mind up about what to do in 2017, I asked a few friends in the startup world for advice and ideas about how to approach startups (especially because I didn’t want to put my credibility as an independent analyst/blogger at stake before making a decision). The offer from this company came through rather quickly and we were already pretty aligned on each other’s expectations. That was easy!
I signed the contract a couple of weeks ago and today (February 1st, 2017), I’m officially joining OpenIO as the Head of Product Strategy. An Impressive title but, don’t worry, it’s still me trying to look ahead while using common sense and making OpenIO technology suitable for the widest possible audience.
And you know what??!! It’ll be easy, I already wrote about it here in post on their our website a couple of weeks ago… this is not your father’s object storage!
Juku Change
Juku will be changing too, but this is a consequence of my role in the industry now. If you are reading this article directly from the website you’ll notice that a different color scheme and layout is already in place. This was done to highlight the change and make it visible to everyone. My goal is to maintain Juku alive and keep it as my personal blog. By personal I don’t mean like in family-stuff kind of personal, rather, Juku.it will be the place where I can share opinions and ideas that won’t be strictly related to what I do on a daily basis. But you can be sure of one thing….. I will definitely continue to talk storage, cloud and IT infrastructure.
I’ll be meeting up with people from the end user community as well as with competitors, analysts and influencers (now from the other side of the fence!) and I want to share what I see and where I think the industry is going. At the end of the day, similar goal… just from a different point of view!
TECHunplugged change
Nothing will change with TECHunplugged, except that I will no longer be the organizer. My friend Arjan will take it from here. I think we’ve done well with this small but very interactive micro-conference and I did my best to help him with the transaction. It will be really rewarding for me to see it continue to grow – It was my idea after all and I loved organizing it.
This year TECHunplugged will be held four times in different countries, and Arjan is lining up some great bloggers and exciting sponsors. If Arjan wants me I’ll try to attend the European events as a participant (or maybe as a sponsor… who knows?? 😉 ).
Closing the circle
There are many more changes going on, some small, some big… But I promised to keep it short, so that’s it for now!
As this blog also marks my departure from the independent bloggers community, I want to thank all the wonderful people I’ve met in these years who have allowed me to be part of such a great group. I’ve learned a lot from them and it’s always been helpful and insightful having frank and serene conversations on what’s happening in our industry. I know I’ll miss it (especially TechFieldDay and its Slack channels), but I strongly hope not all of it… so, please keep in touch and always be frank with me, I promise I’ll do the same!
There is one thing that won’t be changing much in the future though… I will not stop talking about how cool object storage is!
Best of success to you Enrico. You’ve been an inspirational model for me and probably many others. I hope you’ll continue educating us and inspiring us even on the other side of the fence!
thank you for the kind words.
E
Godspeed Enrico; you will succeed wherever you will be. Your Blogs were always interesting, do not stop writing them.
Thank you Roberto!
Don’t worry, I’ll keep writing. 😉