Jeremiah Cook's Blog

This is sort of a mixed post, I recently had an employee and friend move to another state.  That is sad for me and tonight also came with the sad news about Steve Jobs.  That bit of news pushed me over the edge to write something about relationships and separation that I have been meaning to write.

So I just finished watching the Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech from 2005.  Very moving.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

This is what I remember from the speech.

1-the dots will connect looking backward

2-Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, keep looking for what you love and don’t settle.

3-Ask yourself every day “if this was your last day on earth, would you be doing what you are about to do today” -

4-Stay hungry and stay foolish

Wow, I am so so sad to see Steve go, he has had a huge impact on my life and career.  It is very likely I wouldn’t be in the position I am in without Steve.  That goes for many of us.  The first consumer laptop with TFT and palm rest, the first home pc with a mouse, the graphical user interface, even the beautiful fonts that we see on the web, including what you are reading now.  And most recently, I can’t even imagine my last years without an ipod, iphone or MacBook or iPad.  Those things have really changed our industry yet again and have created opportunities for so many people that we can’t even begin to express.  Steve, you truly made your dent in the universe.  You have inspired so many of us with your passion and energy.

I think a lot of people, including myself, that never met Steve, feel like they had a relationship with Steve.  Crazy to think that technology now allows us to have relationships with people we have never met.  Our relationship was our connectedness to his products and his dreams…… and our connection with others that were connected to his products and dreams.  And now even though we still have his products and dreams, we are all dealing with a feeling of separation.  Very strange feeling indeed.  My heart and my prayers go out to his closest family and friends and I know my feelings in no way can even measure to what they must feel right now.

Handling separation in the case of death is very sacred, so I will not talk about that at all in this post other than to say people do live on through those that they inspired, and in Steve Jobs case, he inspired millions.

The rest of this post is me kind of rambling and thinking about relationship separation in general, specifically dealing with a recent situation where a colleague/friend/coworker/tribe-member moved to another state with a different employer  This has happened to me a few times and each time it happens, it really makes me wake up and pay attention.

I have been through many separations in my life before starting my business: falling out of a friendship, breakup with a girlfiend, a friend moving away, a divorce, many more…

In business though, I have had to learn a few more types of separations.  Getting separated from a customer and getting separated from an employee.  Both of those things are really tough.

Every relationship that goes through a separation is tough though.  How you deal with separation is different from individual to individual and situation to situation and there is no “right” way to deal with any of it.  However, one thing that I have to remind myself is that every relationship is a dot in my life and hopefully a dot in someone else’s if that person or organization has or has had a relationship with me in some form or fashion.  All those relationship dots do add up to make up a very large part of your life so each should be treated with respect.

So speaking of treating relationships with respect….

I have always wanted to build strong friendships/family-like relationships with my fellow Varrow’ers.  Those relationships I think form a bond that help us accomplish great things together and allow us to stay together even when the going gets tough.  Those relationships also fill a space in my heart and in my life.  Working with my team at Varrow inspires me daily.  There is no way I would still be doing this if I didn’t have the team that I have, it just wouldn’t be any fun.  The best part of my job is the relationships I get to build and the growth I get to see in myself and others.  So when any of those relationships break, it is very hard.  Sometimes the relationships break hard/sometimes they don’t really break but just become more distant.

Recently, we had one of our engineers move to another state for family reasons.  He ended up taking a job where he could work more locally and we understand, although we wish he were still here.  We will miss Andrew but we won’t forget him and we hope he won’t forget his experience with us.  Andrew really grew a lot while at Varrow and I really enjoyed the relationship we built, however short.  He is definitely the kind of guy that you can trust and would do anything to help our company and most of all, take care of our customers.  He has an awesome attitude, loves to learn, loves technology and has a knack for writing as well.  It’s a bummer to see him go.  Our relationship won’t end just because he is no longer employed here, though.  Heck, I’m a VA boy too and Andrew and I are both Hokies so although we will speak much less frequently, we won’t lose touch.

One really sad part of the separation is removing Andrew’s blog from the Varrowblogs.com syndication but I’m still going to put Andrew’s blogs on my google reader(which hits RSS Runner on my iphone) and keep in touch with him the best I can.  And I’m still going to keep up his older blog excerpts on varrowblogs.com (those are the ones he wrote while employed with us).  Here is the link if you want to keep an eye on his blog, I’m sure there will be lots of goodies to come.  http://2and2is5.wordpress.com/

Andrew, keep in touch, know that we miss you and remember the following:

1-the dots will connect looking backward

2-Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, keep looking for what you love and don’t settle.

3-Ask yourself every day “if this was your last day on earth, would you be doing what you are about to do today” -

4-Stay hungry and stay foolish

Hopefully our dots will connect in the future and I know for a fact looking backwards we have learned a lot.

And Steve, thank you so much for all you have done.  You have been ….. and will continue to be an inspiration.

Reading this book called Enchantment by Guy Kawasaki, recommended to me by Andrew Miller. Thanks Andrew, good timing . Great stuff. Check out this book, be a mensch and go enchant some people

Look up Bruna Martinuzzi “How to be a Mensch in Business“, that’s where Guy got a lot of this.

The two things Guy added were focus on goodwill and Give people the benefit of the doubt.

Here’s my short little video blog for those who rather watch the human talking than just read the words .

There is a ton of other great stuff in this book with regard to how to sincerely become  ”enchanting”.  Great read so far.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

-Updated 4/2/2011 – song link updated to new version

I recently read the phrase “networking for life”. It was in a great article written by the CEO of Pariveda Solutions. Basically,the point is that to be successful in business and in life, networking is not something you do from time to time… it’s something you do all the time. I really believe that. I just interview and talk to people all the time even if I don’t have a job open at the very moment. We are always growing it seems and so I am always recruiting even if we are not always hiring. When you need someone, you need them now and so you need a pipeline. But even more important, if you network with people with the purpose of truly understanding their passions and learning about them, you do way more than build a pipeline, you build true human connections. And sometimes these connections can lead to other great things that you didn’t even know you were looking for. Anyway, I ended up networking with someone by the initials of CT recently. She loves storage and after some good conversation I realized she also loves music and loves to sing. Hmmm. She ended up reading my blog and my youtube and noticed some songs I was working on. It is pretty obvious I don’t have a lot of singing talent but she liked my verses. She decided, without me prompting, that she would do some background tracks for me to lay on top of some of my songs. Just a little gift. Wow! That is so awesome. She just wanted to share her art and collaborate even though we had just met. I think the blogs and the music gave us an extra level of connection. Anyway, it is weird how things happen like this and it is super cool. One minute you are looking for a storage person, the next thing you realize is you have found someone you were looking for to help you on your audio tracks. I love networking and I love technology. Turns out we both had macbooks, we both had garageband and she loaded up dropbox and now we are collaborating via garageband and dropbox. Voila. Crazy right. I love technology.

OK, so here is the remastered version of The Fire Burns Inside with her on the track. This song is soooo much better now, I was looking for someone to do the hook but I never said it out loud that I was looking, I just sort of wanted it to happen. And I got lucky and it did happen. Thank you CT. This song is just about passion and motivation and about the need to run and work through the pain. And even though the pain hurts, we love it and we need it to feel alive. And its about the stress we go through when we are fighting through the struggle of achieving something. And just in general, I want it to be a motivational song to others in my life (others anywhere) to push them to accomplish more than they ever thought they could. It is also a song to my kids and also a song to myself just trying to get out something I was going through. I probably need to re-record the rap but like Seth Godin says, sometimes good to just ship it.

Here it is: FireBurnsInside

Thanks for Joe Kelly for having the guts to be vocal and continuing to push me/us and force me/us to think. And thanks to all of you at Varrow who continue to push yourselves to achieve great things and inspire me and others.

I hope all of you get to enjoy the feeling/pain of the “fire” burning inside you and forcing you to do more.

These are the songs I have written over the past few years.  Started out with I am T-pain and then have moved to garageband.

FireBurnsInside is the new one, really the only one that doesn’t mention computers or Varrow.  But it is still about me and about Varrow.  I need someone to record the chorus for this new one.  Did my best

• Jeremiah Cook and Nolan Cook – Dead and Gone – Virtual (40 plays , 34 downloads)
• Jeremiah Cook and Nolan Cook – Dead and Gone – Virtualized Remix (25 plays , 63 downloads)
• Jeremiah Cook – Black and Orange (49 plays , 56 downloads)
• Jeremiah Cook – Ride the V6 (17 plays , 8 downloads)
• Jeremiah Cook – All the Weather’s Sunny (8 plays , 9 downloads)
• Jeremiah Cook – Cisco UCS Song (11 plays , 12 downloads)
• Jeremiah Cook – VCE Strategy – Gettin Sticky (4 plays , 8 downloads)
• Jeremiah Cook – FireBurnsInside (44 plays , 13 downloads) – This one is crap, before I had CT
• JC and CT – FireBurnsInsideReMastered (60 plays , 45 downloads)
• JC and CT – FireBurnsInsideReMastered2 (1 plays , 0 downloads)

Let’s try this out, did this whole post using blogpress on iPhone.

OK, so this weekend was like an iphone fest for me, tried out lots of things related to iPhone, just thought I’d list a few.

Blogpress for iphone rocks, I can take a video of myself from within blogpress on the iphone and then write a few lines of a blog and then press publish and it puts the video inline on the blog and then also sends a link to facebook and twitter automatically for me.  I’m sure there are a thousand apps that do this but thought it was cool.

Also, I tried out Zentap Pro for iphone, really slick way to write text, it has a really cool autotext feature, you can have templated text that is re-usable, you can do spellchecking and you can even do translations.  I’m not quite sure what I will use it for yet but kind of cool, the main thing is the templated text feature, maybe I will have a situation where I realize that I say the same thing a lot and don’t want to retype it, so I will template it maybe, I don’t know.

One of my friends, Sean, also pointed me at a site called posterous.com , yet another pseudo blogging site with some extra social stuff  ….has a nice iPhone companion and offers some cool group features and very media friendly, thought it was neat.

Something else cool i did on the iPhone was upgrade to 4.3 and enable home sharing.  So now I can share songs among computers and even cooler is if I have a song on my home PC but I haven’t put it on my iPhone, I can play it on my iPhone or iPod or iPad over Wifi without having to sync up.  really cool.

And then finally, I became a $99/year iPhone development member.  And I also bought a $99 copy of RunRev livecode (installed v 4.5 on Friday and then 4.6 was released on Saturday) and have started playing with developing my first Hello World app.  Pretty fun stuff. One of the blogs I am reading to learn more about livecode happens to be on posterous, what a coincidence, as I just learned about it.  Anyway, good blog here with lots of cool video training on livecode.  One day maybe I’ll write a decent app but I really want to see if I can teach my kids to write apps for the iPhone and the iPad.  I think that skill will come in handy.  I think Livecode will be easier than objective C, but nothing’s too easy it seems.

Oh yeah, and then I also tried out 1Password this weekend, doing free trial now.  I’ve got the chrome extension on my macbook pro for 1Password and also got iPhone app.  I’ll let you know more as I find out more.

Also, tried to write some songs lyrics this weekend but couldn’t really get started.  Was thinking about doing something to a instrumental beat of Tracy Chapmans “fast car”  …. maybe like “I am a stress ball”.   Also thought of doing a song to “love the way you lie” that was done by Eminem and Rhiana but haven’t figured it out yet.  But I really love the beats to both of those songs, I keep listening on my iPhone hoping something will hit me.

Anyway, Blogpress is cool, did this whole post from iPhone

Thanks Mr. Jobs and thanks Apple, your net promoter score just went up, I think I’m starting to get it now, even though I didn’t originally want to “get it”.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

So I made a song called All The Weather’s Sunny and posted it on youtube. You can see lyrics below and link to embedded youtube of our Christmas Party that I put to the music. All explained below.

So I like rap music and have always wanted to be a rap star. I think it is because my big brother got me into rap when I was like 10 or so but I really enjoy it. Run DMC – Tougher than Leather was like the first tape I ever purchased with my own money. And it was all Rap/R&B from then on out. I just like the fun in hip hop music. I like all music really but Hip Hop makes me most happy and makes me move and gives me a ton of energy. I started writing rap lyrics when I was a kid but then I quit because I sort of got the feeling that everyone thought it was crazy….. and I had no way to record my songs or download beats. Well now that has all changed…people may still think I’m crazy (it’s all relative) but now recording and finding beats is easy.

I started writing lyrics again in 2010 pretty much all because of the I-am-T-pain app on the iphone. Then I got a Mac with garageband and my addiction to writing rap lyrics has gotten worse. I guess it is because with garageband and I-am-T-pain, almost anyone can sound like a decent rapper (ignorance is bliss). And I can share my crazy music with others.

Another thing I/we are really passionate about is building a great company culture. I want to be part of a culture with a positive spirit and I want to help to drive that from the bottom up with all the crew at Varrow. Actually, we want our culture to be so strong, that it be the glue that holds the company together through thick and thin now and into the future. A lot in the world of IT can change quickly, pretty much everything, but a strong loyal culture can carry us through those changes and help us come out on top.

So I wrote a rap song about our culture and put it to a video of our awesome people during our Christmas party. I got to work on 2 of my passions in one activity today (writing/singing rap lyrics and Varrow culture).  What fun. The song song is called All the Weather’s Sunny. Written to a remix of Right Above It, originally by Little Wayne and Drake. The Karaoke remix was done by DJRedo. I really love this beat. Really Really. My voice is too loud, gotta fix that though.

So here is the rap/video about our business and the culture we are trying to create. Lyrics are down below.

This was made to a video of our Christmas 2010 company party. During this party we did a lot of dancing, hugging, laughing, crying, pants splitting, eating and giving of gifts, including black Varrow hoodies. Our sales team also chipped in and put together a really special gift for a really special guy on our inside operations team, Jesper Christensen, that they wanted to show a special thanks to for all of his hard work. When I watch this video, it really makes me think about that moment and how special that night was. I think we were at a Level 5 that night. Level 5 is a reference to Tribal Leadership and their culture levels, listed below. I also mention Level 5 in our song. I think currently we swing between levels 3,4 depending on the day. Sometimes we can hit a 5, like at the Christmas Party I could feel the team that night, was very special. I thank Jeff Patnaude a lot for our growth to 3 and our bursts into 4 here and there. We would love to stay at a 4.

A lot of my thinking about culture came from recent leadership training with the Patnaude Group. That training has really made me think about what it is possible to accomplish as a team. We will be sending most of our company to this training over the next few years. Also, reading Delivering Happiness (about Zappos creation and its culture) is another reason that I am thinking so much about culture lately. Delivering Happiness is probably the most inspirational book I have read in a long time and then when I was on Zappos website poking around, I noticed they were giving away an audiobook of Tribal Leadership here http://www.zappos.com/tribal.zhtml. I listened Tribal Leadership and it really made me think even more about culture. I’ve also since joined ZapposInsights.com to gain even more culture perspective. One day we would like to go on the Zappos tour. We want Varrow to be the Zappos of IT services. Or something like that. We just want our culture to be awesome. It already is but it can be even better.

Here is a cut and paste about Tribal Leadership from Wikipedia link that explains the Levels I mention in the song: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_Leadership

Logan, King and Fischer-Wright suggest that individuals participate in organizations as members of one or more tribes. A tribe is a basic sociological unit: a group of 20-150 humans. (Like schools of fish, and flocks of birds, we have tribes of people.) The authors used linguistic research methods as well as relationship structures to identify five tribal states that build on one another dimensionally. Each tribal state is more productive and meaningful for its members than the ones below it. Each stage has unique leverage points that nudge people and teams forward in their productivity and expansion, versus an existence of universal principles for teams. Organizations are often composed of numerous tribes.
The five tribal stages are:

1. Stage 1: Tribal members exist in a state of alienation from goals beyond mere survival. They use language to describe their place in the world that asserts that life in general is unfair, perhaps resembling Thomas Hobbes’ imagery of “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In short, “Life Sucks!”
2. Stage 2: Tribal members exist in a state of victimization. They use language that describes their place in the world that suggest that they are powerless and oppressed by forces outside their control. In short, “My life sucks.”
3. Stage 3: Tribal members exist in a state of self-aggrandizing competition. They use language that describes their place in the world as great by virtue of the fact that they have won positions of status and power. In short, “I am great, because you are not!”
4. Stage 4: Tribal members exist in a state of mutual cooperation around a common goal, which is typically characterized by competing against other competitor organizations. They use language that describes their place in the world as meaningful because they are positively contributing to achieving outcomes valued by the tribe by cooperating with other members of the tribe. In short, “We are great (because they are not)!”
5. Stage 5: Tribal members exist in a state of flow. They use language that describes their place in the world as intrinsically meaningful and focused on the good of the universe. In short, “Life is Great!”
Each stage has a predominant mood that describes the quality and the core value of the relationships between tribe members.

1. At Stage 1: members are alienated from each other, and the relationships are undermining.
2. At Stage 2: members are separate from each other, and the relationships are ineffective.
3. At Stage 3: there is typically personal domination of one member over others, and relationships are developed for their usefulness
4. At Stage 4: stable partnerships are attained, as relationships are deemed important. A tribe member is successful only if all members are successful.
5. At Stage 5: a team of stable partnerships exists, and relationships are vital.
Typically, tribes advance one stage at a time. Stages are not skipped. Without progressive intention at a particular stage, cultures may also degrade, typically, one stage at a time.
The job of a tribal leader is to continually elevate the culture. If a tribe has a strong leader who is stable in the next higher stage, a tribe may be catalyzed to advance as a whole.
The study indicates a significant productivity lift is achieved of at least 30% when a leader manages a sustainable cultural shift from Stage 3 to Stage 4. The book discusses how leaders may realize such goals.

Here are the lyrics to my song:

Quick Explanation of some things: The song is about being positive and focusing on our purpose and our passion. No matter how much stress we go through, no matter the long hours, no matter the lack of organization we sometimes seem to have, we have so much to be thankful for and to be positive about. We have to remember to focus on our passion and our purpose, each other and of course the customer. And we have to remember not to get confused and think our sole purpose is to make money. Our purpose is to build the datacenters of the future and the human networks of the future. The money will come if we do everything else right. We have such an awesome team so I love to sing about our team. There are some references in the song to Black and Orange, those are our team spirit colors. You see those colors in our logo. Also I did another song called Black and Orange, also about our culture. And I referred to Black and Orange as the new Dynamic Duo, we are way better than the Dynamic Duo of Harold and Kumar, that just rhymed in the song, not really any deep thought there. When I say vpimps, that just refers to all the Varrow employees. VirtualizationPimps VarrowPimps, shortened to vPimps. Also I referenced the term v6 in the song. That has to do with another song I did where I referred to Varrow as the v6. Varrow starts with v and has 6 letters total. So I said Ride the v6)

Finally, the lyrics:

Now all the weathers sunny
You know you havin fun when it aint about the money
We onnnn
‘Cause we onnnn

Who else really tryna be a virtual rap star? Writin rhymes in the car
We with all our vpimps trying to raise the vbar
Never knew that black and orange coulda make it this far
The new dynamic duo like Harold n Kumar
And uh, our real friends always hear us say
Find your passion, get to smashin, and never let it fade
That’s why we pick and choose, sometimes we get confused
But when we work our passion, we almost never lose
We gotta tight crew, made up of super dudes
We live in different places, but got the same views
Alarm clocks, we never hit the snooze
At sunrise, up and at ‘em we be in our shoes
And these days the stress can really drain us
So we work our purpose and the purpose will sustain us
don’t put us in a box cause a box will not contain us
Just cause we be on fire, don’t mean you gotta flame us

Now all the weather’s sunny
You know you havin fun when it aint about the money
We on
It’s Young JC varrow lovers
If you aint running with us, get with a varrow lover, aight
Now show me who’s pimpin in this place
All my playas wit me, we be limpin through this place, ya dig?
We will finish the race first
Black and Orange Baby,
We All write the next verse

Meet us at the front desk
All signed in and ready for whats next
U Ain’t got no time for no scrubs, Rejects
We know u aint down with no downtime , VPLEX
And we talk until we see checks
And all my fellas know how to deal with a T-Rex
All about perfection, we hate defects
And our team be growing ever stronger, bowflex
(we drive a hybrid) cloud in our hands
Ride the V6, we got you datacenter plan, amen

And it doesn’t matter wherever we land
We get it crackin, desktop/server/network/san
good morning vietnam, wake up and do some push ups
High energy so they can’t overlook us
Remember to give thanks whenever clients book us
We know It’s hot outside but we won’t let it cook us

Now all the weather’s sunny
You know you havin fun when it aint about the money
We on
It’s Young JC varrow lovers
If you aint running with us, get with a varrow lover , aight

Now show me who’s pimpin in this place
All my playas wit me, we be limpin through this place, ya dig?
We will finish the race first
Black and Orange Baby,
We All write the next verse

Uh, how do we deliver world class
Customer service while we be growin so fast
Build relationships, that’s all that we ask
Focus on the client needs, not cash
We’re own biggest fan
But we gotta stay humble like a good Varrow man
Delivering happiness, read the book twice
It’s all about culture and trust, be nice
Now com’on, find your own inner fire
When your loyal to the team, the team will take you higher
Do it big, don’t sweat the small stuff squash that
Work hard play hard, and don’t forget the pimp hat
Get the heart beat jumping like a jumping jack
Take the tribe to level 5, its a culture rap
Work the purpose til it hurts ya , Where you head be at
Top down to bottom up, we gotta keep it flat

Now all the weather’s sunny
You know you havin fun when it aint about the money
We on
It’s v6 varrow lovers
If you aint running with us, get with a varrow lover, aight

Now show me who’s pimpin in this place
All my playas wit me, we be limpin through this place, ya dig?
We will finish the race first
Black and Orange Baby,
We All write the next verse

Just so you know, we are super passionate about this little company that we (all of the employees at Varrow)  have built so far.  It’s an awesome place with an awesome future ahead of it… a future that is so much bigger than it is today.  This is a company built by great people to serve great people.   Our purpose is to help design and build the data centers of the future.  And inside that purpose  is another purpose: to take incredibly good care of our customers, period.  Because guess what, we can only build the data centers of the future if we have customers that believe in our capabilities and that believe that we care.

Sometimes I get a little scared.  I get a little feeling in my stomach.  Nothing bad, just a gut feeling that I should be a little cautious.  I say to myself,” how can we make sure that we are always taking “incredibly good care of our customers”?”  That is a big job that involves every employee in a customer service company.  It involves sales, sales engineering, project management, post sales engineering.  It involves everyone.   We all have to be thinking about this all the time.  It involves a great amount of communication and expectation management to take “incredible care of a customer”.  It takes a great amount of process.  It also takes intuition.  We work in a complex world with complex technology and with lots of customers that have differing expectations.  Sometimes even 2 people at the same customer will have different expectations of how they think a particular project should be handled.  Lots of things to think about, Ahhh!!!!   Sometimes I get a little scared as I think of the complexities of how to manage all of those expectations.

Is it bad to be a little scared sometimes?  Personally, I think it is healthy to have a little dose of fear.  It keeps you on your toes and keeps you looking out for risks that may come up to bite you and/or your customer.

Don’t freak out and stress out over things you can’t control.  Yeah right, you say.  Jeremiah, you are the king of stress, like you can talk.  Well, yeah, whatever.  But always remember, it is the customer that keeps us in business and it is their perceptions that matter.  We have to meet or exceed their expectations.  We have to manage risk.  We have to be one or two or three steps ahead of the problems that are surely out there.  And we know in this complex world of IT, there will be problems.

But guess what, part of the fun of this business is the unknown and the fun of uncovering and solving problems, there is fun to be had managing expectations in a dynamic world.

A little bit of fear is healthy in my opinion…..you know why, because it makes you think!  Your fear protects you.  Without fear, without those little gut instincts, maybe you wouldn’t think.  Maybe you would miss something.  Your fear can save you.

Anyway, off to a great night of rest.  I will put my little fears to bed for a while and dream great positive dreams of the future.   Because for sure, our positive visions for the future are much bigger than our fears and they are so much more fun to dream about. 

Good night.

We are looking for more great engineers to add to our team.  We would like you to answer the following questions to see if you may be a good fit for our team.

• 1a-Are you a server virtualization geek that has experience with enterprise virtualization solutions?
• 1b-Or are you an enterprise storage geek that loves integrating storage with both virtual and non-virtual solutions?
• 1c-Or are you a desktop and application virtualization geek that has experience with products from Microsoft, Citrix, Vmware and others?
• 1e-Or maybe a Cisco UCS or Nexus or just a Cisco datacenter geek?
• 1e-Or how about a Microsoft Exchange or SQL junkie that is excited about virtualizting Tier 1 apps?
• 1f-Or maybe you love enterprise data recovery solutions like SAN replication with recoverpoint or V-plex,   and integration of those solutions with Vmwware SRM?
• 1g-Or maybe you love backup and data protection solutions including Avamar and Networker and DataDomain?
• 1h-Or maybe you love all of the above?

• 2a-In general, do you love working with super cool, ever-changing and complex datacenter technology that solves complex business problems?
• 2b-Do you like to make a difference in the place where you work? Do you like to solve problems? Do you like helping people?
• 2c-Do you find yourself reading the latest blogs and twitter feeds about enterprise IT technologies?
• 2d-Do you like to see yourself getting smarter each day? Do you like to be surrounded by people you respect and who challenge you?
• 2e-Do you like to be fairly compensated and rewarded for your hard work?
• 2f- Do you like to work hard and have fun at the same time?
• 2g- Are you cool with travel throughout the Carolinas and possibly Southern Virginia and Eastern TN?
• 2h- Do you want to be a part of a growing company and all the good and sometimes hard things that go along with that?

Well, if you answered yes to at least a few lines of part 1 of the questioning and you answered yes to all of part 2 of the questioning, then I think we should talk. We are looking for you. We need you.

Varrow was recently ranked as # 89 on the Inc 500 list of fastest growing companies in America.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/varrow-recognized-on-inc-500-as-one-of-the-fastest-growing-companies-in-america-101511969.html

We have achieved this growth because of our great team. Good people are very hard to find but we’ve done a great job so far and I’m hoping this posting will help us find some more so we can continue our growth and continue to build our reputation of excellence.

Please go to our Careers page to fill out a job application: http://www.varrow.com/?s=one-column&c=careers

We are putting out an APB here. Varrow is continually growing and we need more top talent to maintain our level of growth and to keep serving up top quality solutions to our growing base of customers.

Today, we have 2 Sales Engineering positions open and at least 3 positions for implementation engineers. All positions will be based in the Carolinas.

Don’t apply unless you are passionate about what you do and you have a deep desire to be the very best you can be. We are always looking for great people, period. Oh, and even if you don’t fit one of these 2 types of roles, but you think you have something we need, go to our careers page and submit a resume and a good cover letter anyway. You never know.

Sales Engineering positions are open for a position covering the western side of North Carolina. Also, looking for a Sales Engineer to cover South Carolina and Charlotte areas.

Implementation Engineering positions are available across the Carolinas.

Our main areas of concentration of employees are in Raleigh, Charlotte , Greensboro and Columbia. So if you live, or are willing to live, in or near one of those areas, that would be best.

So what makes a great Varrow employee?

Well, across the board at Varrow, no matter the position, successful individuals are self-motivated, love to be challenged, are extremely passionate about their area of focus and finally, they are excited to play a role in helping this small business maintain its rapid growth and quality reputation.

For Sales Engineers specifically: You have to love to be in front of customers and you must love to present and be strong technically on a wide range of datacenter products. This is a very demanding job that requires day travel and some overnight travel going from sales call to sales call and a considerable amount of technical sales related tasks to help provide the right solutions for our customers. You must be willing to present technically at tradeshows or marketing events in addition to presenting in front of a wide range of customer audiences on different technologies. You must be able to build very strong relationships with your customers and with the sales reps that you cover and you have to be very organized in managing your schedule and many tasks. A good sales engineer must have enterprise datacenter experience, have a very strong work ethic, have a strong logical engineer thinking brain but have the business street smarts of a sales rep and be able to provide a very high level of customer service. Sales Engineers are required to maintain technical certification in certain specific areas but be capable of carrying on technical conversations with Varrow customers in all of our areas of focus. Certifications such as VCP, CCNA, CCIE, CCEE, EMC Storage specialist are desired. But really even more important than a certification is experience. And more important than experience is an ability to learn quickly. And possibly more important than that is having the right attitude. The Sales Engineering role is measured and rewarded based on quarterly sales success and meeting technical certification goals and other MBOs set by management. We deal with midsize to enterprise customers and complex solutions ranging from Citrix XenDesktop, XenApp, Vmware View, SRM, ESX, LabManager, Clariion, Celerra, V-Max, V-plex, Recoverpoint, Networker, Avamar, DataDomain, DPA, Cisco UCS, Nexus, MDS, Virtualized Microsoft Exchange, SQL, Oracle solutions.. etc. Just to name a few. If you have enterprise experience in some of these areas and you want to grow your experience, then this is the place. We do offer training but we also expect people to be able to self-study as well. We have lots of lab gear, pretty much everything listed above except for V-Max and V-plex, we have in our labs.

For implementation engineers specifically: You have to be very good technically in your area of focus but you have to be humble at the same time. You need to care deeply for your customers and provide the highest levels of customer service. Implementation engineers aren’t usually involved heavily in the formal sales process but if you think about it, our implementation engineers are the glue that keeps us in our customers and therefore are our best salespeople. If our implementation engineers are not the best, our entire value prop goes down the drain. Implementation engineers typically specialize in a few areas where Sales Engineers typically are more broad in their areas of knowledge. Certifications such as VCP, CCNA, CCIE, CCEE, EMC Storage specialist are desired. But really even more important than a certification is experience. And more important than experience is an ability to learn quickly. And possibly more important than that is having the right attitude. The Implementation engineering role is measured and rewarded based on billability goals and meeting technical certification goals and other MBOs set by management. We deal with midsize to enterprise customers and complex solutions ranging from Citrix XenDesktop, XenApp, Vmware View, SRM, ESX, LabManager, Clariion, Celerra, V-Max, V-plex, Recoverpoint, Networker, Avamar, DataDomain, DPA, Cisco UCS, Nexus, MDS, Virtualized Microsoft Exchange, SQL, Oracle solutions.. etc. Just to name a few. If you have enterprise experience in some of these areas and you want to grow your experience, then this is the place. We do offer training but we also expect people to be able to self-study as well. We have lots of lab gear, pretty much everything listed above except for V-Max and V-plex, we have in our labs. Both day travel and some overnight travel is required throughout the Carolinas, Southern Virginia and Eastern TN. There are also opportunities to work from home when not at a customer location.

Other things to know about Varrow:

The business formally started as Cook Consulting Services in 2004. But I like to tell people we really didn’t start to figure out who we were until around late 2006 when we changed our name to Varrow and we decided we were going to focus on high-end datacenter solutions built around virtualization technologies. We started participating heavily in Vmware user groups in Greensboro and Charlotte in 2007 and we had another big break through in 2007 when we picked up EMC as our storage vendor partner. And then when we formally merged with Weiss IT Consulting as of January 2008 and officially changed the name to Varrow, Inc, that is when things really took off to the next level. We are a high-touch services company built by engineers. We pride ourselves in having the best engineers(both presales and post sales) in our areas of focus who also deliver the best customer service in the region. We also have a world class sales team that when coupled with our world-class engineering team, has lead us to the growth we have achieved since our humble beginnings in a basement in Greensboro in 2004. This is a fast paced business and it can be “crazy” at times going through the rapid growth and keeping up with the ever-changing marketplace. We have grown from 5 people as of January 2008 to 35 people as of September 2010. To succeed here, you have to be willing to put up with, and even enjoy, “the craziness” that goes along with the “goodness” . We are not a large corporation nor have we been around for a long time. We don’t have it all figured out but I think we have made some great achievements so far and we look forward to many more. We are still young, still eager, still hungry, still driven, still learning. Sometimes we have to figure things out as we go, but that is part of the fun. We all learn something new every day. We have a great set of customers that we care deeply for and we hire the very best people we can find to serve those customers as best as we possibly can. We have a great set of vendors that we work with as well: EMC, Vmware, Cisco and Citrix just to name the top 4. We build strong healthy relationshpis with our customers, our vendors and our employees. We work hard and we demand excellence. And we are super duper passionate about what we do!

Awards and Recognition:

• One of the first Vmware Premier Partners in the Carolinas as of 2007
• To date, we have the most VCPs in the Carolinas of any reseller
• Top Vmware revenue producing partner in the Carolinas in 2007
• Fastest growing EMC Partner in the Country in 2008
• Won Regional Vmware growth awards in 2008
• Cisco Rookie Partner Award for the Carolinas in 2009
• EMC Commercial Partner of the Year for North America 2009
• Achieved Cisco UCS ATP Partner Certification in 2010 and became one of only 54 Vblock Partners in the World
• We have 2 vExperts on staff and one VCDX, Clariion Specialists, Celerra Specialists, 2 CCIE-writtens, More than 10 VCP’s
• Ranked Number 5 of Triad Fastest Growing companies in 2009
• Ranked Number 89 fastest growing company in United States 2010 per Inc Magazine
• Our engineers all blog and we have gotten lots of recognition for our blogs, which is awesome
• And most importantly, we have built some very strong relationships with some very wonderful customers based on our excellence and integrity over this time. The greatest award is to have repeat customers and to earn new customers based on great references.

Resume Posting Tips:

In addition to putting your resume up on our career site, to really get noticed, put a heart felt letter up on the career site too. Include something you have accomplished that you are really proud of. When it comes to a career in IT, tell us what you believe in, what excites and motivates you. Tell us something to set you apart and make it clear to us that you have the right attitude and background to succeed here. And try to build a relationship with one of our engineers via twitter or blogs or linkedin. We take recommendations from our engineers very seriously.

We look forward to hearing from you.

http://www.varrow.com/?s=one-column&c=careers