Working in technology for large Enterprises can be electrifying. Having your hand in many different technologies that drive the business and deliver positive experiences to customers brings great satisfaction. I have spent the last 15 years of my life on this side of the glass, most recently in the deep end of digital transformation at Humana as a Director in Cloud.

I’ve built platforms for companies that deliver scalable, fully automated, and software-defined network services. Modernized delivery models from projects to products and teams to platforms multiplying capabilities, and increasing agility. I’m proud of the small role I played in helping industry giants like Humana accelerate their digital transformation. Now seeing the forest from the trees, I’m enthusiastic at the opportunity to play a role in an industry-wide evolution of networking.

Many large businesses today have amassed numerous technologies, processes, and teams over the years. Some industries, specifically Healthcare, have a large brick and mortar presence connecting hospitals, pharmacies, and clinics. With multi-cloud being a new reality, interconnecting these disparate areas of the network securely presents a new set of challenges in moving legacy systems to the cloud.

Balancing brownfield environment sprawl, lack of staffing, and cloud disruption with the exponentially increasing speed at which the business needs to move is commonplace for technical teams today. In the network space specifically, many new technologies follow RFC1925 – Rule 11 in that they are old ideas repurposed and proposed again with a different name and creative marketing.

In working with the Alkira team over the last few years on the customer side, it is clear that the team’s vision for closing the gap between traditional and cloud networking is not a dated and repurposed idea. Taking the colossal value gained from how the public cloud transformed compute and application delivery and applying it to the network as a whole will accelerate the way businesses can deliver value. Reinforcing this shift is Microsoft’s strategic collaboration with Alkira. This raises the bar for the network industry as a whole which is why I’m thrilled to be stepping into the vendor space for the first time to work with the Alkira team as they reimagine networking for the cloud era.

To me, stepping away from the enterprise space is much larger than a new opportunity. I have become incredibly passionate about using technology to deliver lifelong wellbeing and healthier outcomes while working in Healthcare. The place where applications, data, and systems intersect is the network, and businesses desperately need solutions that reduce complexity while enabling them to focus on serving their customers.

I look forward to sharing my journey.