Solution Specialist - Azure

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We are passionate, performance-driven and empowered to deliver results for our customers — as their needs change and grow, so do we. That’s why we continuously develop, expand and refine our offering. We believe in the growing importance of advisory services and business consulting to help our clients. Our people need to be curious, ready to go the extra mile, smart and engaged in shaping the future, because we never stand still when searching for the best solutions and most innovative services. We remain focused on our common goal to make all the difference.

As the Solution, Service and Platform Company of choice, SoftwareONE provides an integrated set of Software Lifecycle Management and Technology Services to our end customers.

The Software Solution Specialist (Sol Spec) – Azure is responsible for driving and co-owning Azure solution sales, business development, and marketing activities within his/her assigned region. The role functions as a partnership with the primary account manager and as a result is not limited to traditional “overlay role” restrictions, the Sol Spec is expected to take a consistently proactive approach to developing the technical solutions business in the region. The Sol Spec is the technical lead in the region for pre-sales (both transactional and professional services) customer engagements and sales enablement for the respective region. The role also serves as the liaison between the assigned sales team and customers and professional services delivery resources which include both in-house and partner delivered services. The Sol Spec will scope professional services opportunities and assist in the creation and delivery of Statements of Work (SoW) to customers. The Sol Spec will be required to maintain an advanced level of technical knowledge across a deep set of foundational technologies as well as at least one specific technology set to serve as the subject matter expert for that specific subject on a national and/or global scale.

Practice Summary:

Azure is one of the technology practices focused on the delivery of software centric datacenter solutions with an emphasis on Hybrid Cloud and Next Generation datacenter technologies (future in the context of next-gen). The role will require cross solution level technical understanding and expertise across multiple platforms (primarily Windows & Linux), hybrid cloud (with a focus on management, operations, and automation), database (SQL, ORCL, SAP, RDS, Aurora), public cloud (IaaS, PaaS), Application Devolvement, cloud native applications and Development Operations (DevOps). While the primary focus will be on Amazon Web Services technologies, there will be a reliance in the expertise in foundational partners such as, but not limited to, VMware, Red Hat, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins and others will serve as foundational technologies within the stack. The practice will also include “emerging technology” solutions from newer publishers and vendors that are finding traction in the broader marketplace and/or serve a specific niche solution.

Looking for a strong consultative solutions architect that is passionate about moving customers from on-premises (or even cloud to cloud) with the right best practices, right architected solution design to ensure a phenomenal customer experience on Cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure.

Able to work in an extremely fast-paced environment, with high adaptability, strong self-leadership and an entrepreneurial spirit.

Solution Architecture

• Conduct structured and formal one-to-few and one-to-many discovery and scoping workshops to understand customer business requirements and translate those business requirements into formal business requirements documents that map to the service design documents for solution implementation
• Consult customers on the value proposition of moving to their workloads to the target Cloud platform and participate in deep architectural discussions to ensure solutions are designed for successful deployment in the cloud. Structured consulting framework, approach and AS-IS TO-BE. Creation of business requirements documents and other consulting assets.
• Significant design/implementation/consulting experience in an enterprise environment
• Significant experience in application architecture, devSecOps pipeline architecture, cloud infrastructure architecture.
• Expert level knowledge of Cloud migration process, associated tools from discovery, migration, including database and schema change level migration methodologies with working hands-on level experience
• High level of comfort communicating effectively across internal and external organizations, mapping of power structures and adapting to ensuring decision makers are aligned in key meetings
• Demonstrated ability to adapt to new technologies and learn quickly
• Hands on experience migrating or transforming legacy customer workloads to the cloud
• Background in modern cloud deployment techniques and automation tools
• Strong knowledge in common reference cloud architectures

Pre-Sales

• Strong structured preparation for meetings
• Ability to scope customer requirements, scope effort of service engagement, create work break down structure, risk contingencies and project timelines
• Strong business writing skills – significant expertise in writing clear statements of work with clear elements of inclusions, exclusions and customer dependancies
• Ability to create the business case, which might mean quantification of risks, effort of current state and quantification of savings from target operating architecture. This could mean activity-based costing in order to calculate entire cost from as-is to to-be state or the calculation of value from each phase of a customer roadmap that has been developed. This should also include qualitative, intangibles such as competitive advantage, flexibility, technical debt etc.
• Ability to explain to CFO/Financial Controller level

Go-To-Market and Business Planning

• Create a simple concise plan to develop the business, which prioritized offerings in-market and what type of customers
• Alliance and Partnering - Create the necessary collateral and as needed work with the principals in order to create alignment of the application modernization customer journey against existing cloud adoption frameworks
• Pick your market segment, pick your team. Create and plan the area of focus, the accounts and the team, then lead the deal pursuit
• As necessary work with marketing for any required collateral, or demand generation content, thought leadership content

#LI-JG1

Technical Skills

• Expert in Cloud Discovery and Assessment, Cloud Security, Cloud Migration and Managed Services
• Expert level experience on AWS or Azure
• DevOps Native, Automation background - Common technology DevOps tooling: Github, Bitbucket, Jenkins, Bamboo, Docker, Kubernets, Chef or Puppet, Ansible, Terraform, Dynatrace/Nagios/Splunk, Prometheus, Veracode, Sonarcube
• Familiar with common cloud design patterns, reference architectures and common bad design mistakes on Cloud
• API, Microservices and Serverless

Leadership and Management Skills

• This role is a very dynamic role and will work with country executives, regional executives, global leadership while also facing the CxO’s in the field. This requires strong executive level communication skills.
• Lead with influence, inspiration mixed with the skills to ensure that stakeholders are held accountable and to shore up support when and where required in order to drive the business outcome
• Ability to scale and build a team of leaders, develop and mentor talent

Certification

AWS SA Professional + AWS DevOps Engineer Professional

OR

Azure SA Expert + Azure DevOps Expert