Azhagarasu A

Duration with employer: 8.6 years on January 2023

I am currently leading a team of passionate Customer Experience Engineers (CXE) who are enabled to support various phases of presales selling motion with a focus on offering the best customer experience. My team of engineers is aligned to support the Unstructured Data Solutions (UDS) group of Dell Technologies. As a people leader and a business manager, my current role allows me to enjoy various facets of leadership such as,

• Business Operation & Development
• Innovation & Initiatives
• Talent Enablement & Team Engagement
• Community & Volunteering
  

My role and accomplishments

• Develops and executes sales engineering and/or complex specialist selling strategies.
• Responsible to strategize, develop, implement an operating model for the UDS Specialty Customer Experience Engineers with Dell Technologies Presales field personnel and customers.
• Designed team strategy and objectives for 2020, 2021, and 2022. The recent business operating model was codenamed as DARRE (Develop, Advance, Recruit, Retain, Expand)
• Develop - skills for team members, Advance - opportunities to advance in role, Recruit - obtain fine talent from the market, Retain - measures to prevent attrition, Expand - New opportunities for building long term career and business results.
• New operating model yielded better results. Registered 59% YoY growth of team member presales activities on deals and accounts and drove team revenue impact by 120% YoY during 2021 - 2022.
• Met high headcount demand by hiring new talent, planned their enablement, and deployed them to the role in a timely manner..
• Expanded the roles and responsibilities of the Customer Experience Engineers to carry additional technical depth and functional knowledge.
• Introduced CXE Divisional Lead (Team Lead) role for efficient management of talent within team and to promote mentorship.
• Developed a point-based method to categorize organization's (Presales Center of Excellence) talent depth. The tool and method was adopted by all business segments in the org.
• Based on the tool and method, team member talent distribution was derived to identify individual strengths and development options. The measurement was applicable for over 300 individuals.
• Curated a concept to measure team member potential in driving business outcomes in accordance to the tenure and current skills of the team member. Made recommendations for creating opportunities to retain hi-potential team members and measures to grow team member skill based on tenure and scalability.
• Conceptualized and designed scenario-based learning method for new hires to quickly ramp them to production role.
• Active participant on global internal initiatives where I drove the culture of innovation and knowledge sharing.
• Identified community volunteering activities quarterly which had benefited our team as we were able to come together and work towards a social cause.

• Improved adoption of customer experience activities in US North East territory
• Improved collaboration & partnership among Systems Engineers, Sales Reps (Account Executives) and customer experience engineers
• Implemented methods to source feedback, problem finding and devised appropriate measures to improvise business results & outcomes
• Activities and Interactions within the sales team grew by 34% YoY during 2019 - 2020 and the overall deliverables within the team improved by 83% YoY during the same period
• Conceptualized engineering methods to address PowerScale system log upload and data collection errors for deep insights on system capacity and performance. This led to improved demand generation conversation between presales and customers.
• Successfully piloted and deployed Customer Experience Engineers for newly formed Enterprise Preferred accounts (unactivated accounts) in the North America territory
• Formulated a targeted enablement for faster deployment and drove early results.
• Built insightful reports to infer/measure and monitor business progress and created dashboards for frequent business reviews with leadership and global stakeholders
• Created mentorship framework for Presales and Customer Experience Engineering cross collaboration and enablement
• Strategized presales participation on Industry Vertical Workstream practices such as AI, Video Surveillance, HPC, M&E, Performance which resulted in many micro play for diving incremental revenue.
• Customer Product Demo Project: Built the SC Series Demo program from scratch and brought to a successful pilot. Trained engineers to deliver customer demos and made it a staple service in offering which was widely adopted by field presales.
• Developed comprehensive product presentation and collaterals for Dell Technologies world (2019) customer presentation on Deep Learning methodologies such as CNN and RNN.

As a Senior Systems Engineer Analyst, I specialize in building Isilon and ECS proposals, answering Isilon technical presales questions and Isilon technical drawings. I and my team work closely with specialists SE's of Dell EMC Unstructured Data Solutions group. My day to day responsibilities are,

• Creating compelling sales proposals for new Isilon and ECS systems by highlighting solution KPI's, Business Value
  Drivers, Investment summary and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with the existing solutions installed in the data
  center.
• Expert in generating #GetModern for Isilon and Isilon State of the Cluster assessments.
• As part of the Dell EMC #GetModern initiative, I am expert in suggesting best fit (Isilon & ECS) solutions for a customer environment by understanding their existing environment and need.
• Capable of running product demos to customers and internal teams.
• Proactive cluster monitoring for Isilon that includes conducting health checks and capacity trend monitoring.
• Expert in answering technical presales questions of Isilon and ECS.
• Expert level knowledge in MyQuotes (Dell EMC ordering system). I can create quotes for Isilon and ECS solutions and troubleshoot configuration errors/bugs in the MyQuotes ordering system.
• SME for Dell EMC Isilon, Dell EMC Unity, Dell EMC SC Series and VxRail.
• Whenever there is a new release, I attend trainer the trainer sessions of these products and initiate knowledge transfer to the team member.
• Act as a consultant for team members and help them in answering complex pre-sales technical questions raised by field SE's.
• Deliver technical sessions to team members periodically.
• Currently mentoring a team member who is a GSAPer. GSAP program recruits college grads for technical roles in Dell EMC.
• I published whitepaper titled "Invisible Robots" under the Dell EMC Knowledge Sharing program.
• Designed technical training curriculum (Technical Helpdesk) for new joiners of Presales Solution Services (PSS).
• Delivered multiple training classes for new hires on Technical Helpdesk service.
• Mentoring new hires joining our team after training.
• Contributed to Dell EMC India Center of Excellence "LifeCare MARS" project by looking after the projects Infrastructure needs. The solution used ECS as a storage repository.
• Selected as India COE Innovation Evangelist.

My primary job is to provide technical and consultative support to EMC Field Technology Solutions & Sales on specific solutions for a range of consulting projects.

• Specialized in Host connectivity, Storage, Cloud and Replication technologies.
• Providing consultative technical support for various EMC products. Every day I interact with EMC’s Presales System Engineers and Partners
• Acting as a liaison between various product engineering, marketing and SE’s.
• Core job is to provide support for SE’s and Partners. We answer all the technical and licensing questions raised by them in a timely manner. This enables them to outperform in the field and it is very crucial in closing a deal.
• Mostly we answer product related questions and also verify if a proposed solution will fit in customer environment.
• SE’s and Partners contact us for general consultation on product features and designed solution to understand how it
  would benefit customer. So that the products can be appropriately positioned.
• Our team supports almost all products offered by EMC except the ones which comes under VCE, RSA and Pivotal.

Following are the EMC products that we work on,

RecoverPoint, VPLEX, ViPR Controller, ViPR SRM, ScaleIO, Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS), XtremIO, vSphere 5.5, vSphere 6.0, VMware vRealize suites, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (VMware Edition), Isilon, Connectrix (Brocade, Cisco directors and switches), CloudArray, Avamar, OpenStack, VNX2 series, VNXe series, VMAX series, VMAX3 series, etc.,

• I have strong understanding and experience in the above-mentioned products and technology, this helps us to suggest proper solutions in specific conditions and also easily answer some of the most complicated questions raised by customers and Presales field engineers
• Administration skills in various operating systems such as VMware ESXi (5.5 & 6.0), Ubuntu server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE
• I have published a whitepaper on OpenStack – “EMC for Cinder and Swift” , this white paper was published under EMC proven professionals knowledge sharing program
• I have delivered tech sessions in EMC to various crowds on OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, ViPR Controller, Software
• Defined Storage and vSphere
• Our team provides support for 2000+ System Engineers worldwide

• I work on HP EVA’s, MSA, NAS, FC HBA and troubleshooting host OS for storage related issues.
• I have a very good practical experience on Continuous Access (Remote Replication) and Business copy (Local Replication)
• Has carried out initial setup on various storage arrays for HP customers.
• Strong understanding of various Path selection policies (PSP) and knows how to tune them for optimal performance
• Has done Performance analysis of many of our customer’s storage arrays and provided solution for best performance
• Has done replication setup for HP customers and solved typical replication oriented problems such as connectivity, latency etc
• Hands on experience in VMware ESXi OS for various storage-related setup and basic troubleshooting Strong understanding of various SAN protocols such as FC, iSCSI, SAS
• Has written multiple knowledgebase articles for HP internal knowledge base.
• Strong understanding of various SAN protocols such as FC, iSCSI, SAS, FCOE, FCIP.
• Storage provisioning (LUN Provisioning) (FC and iSCSI) - to various operating systems
• I am very effective in troubleshooting SAN to resolve the problem and can bring back SAN to production in very stipulated time
• Troubleshooting Fiber channel SAN Switches for connectivity issues or zoning issues
• Hands on experience in troubleshooting windows and ESX hosts for host connectivity and storage provisioning issues.
• In-depth knowledge in troubleshooting hardware components on a storage array by using various tools and logs to diagnose and identify the failed components and can provide a recommendation to eradicate the problem
• Hands on experience on Network Attached Storage (NAS) components and have the ability to configure a new NAS system
• Hands on experience in configuring and troubleshooting various HBA’s and converged network adapter (CNA’s) on hosts