Architect Solutions - Storage

TitleArchitect Solutions - Storage

Job Description

The position requires a technologically competent individual with proven ability in a pre-sales or sales consultative capacity. The incumbent will be a customer-focused technical sales professional who will provide high level support and guidance to customers, becoming their trusted technical advisor. The role requires collaboration with the Account Manager to recommend and develop appropriate customer solution offerings.

The successful candidate will be expected provide an architectural perspective across the ADB Storage and Compute product portfolio and leverage their specialization for specific opportunities. To be involved with GTM product development and driving new business.

The position requires a technologically competent individual with proven ability in a pre-sales or sales consultative capacity. The role will be a customer-focused technical sales engineer.

To work effectively with the key stakeholders across the Infrastructure practice and sales teams within ADB to effectively lead the aligned pre-sales engagements to success

To engage with CxO level stakeholders at prospective clients in advisory capacity to deliver high impact solution-shaping workshops

Analyse customer business problems, elicit functional and non-functional requirements, and formulate actionable strategies to solve customer challenges by leveraging existing offerings or through the creation of new offerings

Producing compelling value propositions and customer solutions, throughout the sales lifecycle, owning the Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure elements of formal RFI/RFP and client conversations / presentations as required

Be fully mobile and support sales teams in client presentations and meetings, supporting the proposed technical solutions

Working with the sales teams, contributing to sales and margin target achievements on assigned pipeline opportunities

The ability to lead workshops and brainstorming sessions designed to identify and plan high value strategic solutions

Ensuring ADB quality and efficiency practices are adhered to

Maintain technology and market awareness to ensure the production of relevant customer propositions and offerings

Achieve and maintain OEM PreSales certifications as required by ADB

Main Tasks:

Provide technical assistance and guidance during pre-sales process by identifying customers technical and business requirements

Engage customers face-to-face (own transport essential) or via collaborative tools and technology such as Microsoft Teams.

Consult with technical teams regarding capabilities

Support account managers and partners on proposed activities.

Accurately qualify opportunities

Proactively generate leads through customer engagements

Define customer business problem in a technical context

Define solution options and articulate the benefits of a solution

Develop presentation material and present proposed solutions to customer

Create Visio diagrams and solutions overview documentation, explaining the proposed solution

Effectively listing all applicable exclusions and assumptions

Thoroughly assessing environment compatibility, to eliminate potential implementation issues

Education Required:

Industry related certifications – NetApp, Pure Storage, Huawei, Dell, X-Fusion, H3C

Vendor related certifications such as NetApp, Pure Storage, Dell, X-Fusion, H3C

Competency with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Visio will be required for creating proposals

Experience Required:

8 to 12 years PreSales Experience with a systems integrator

Essential Competencies:

As a customer facing role which includes traveling to customers, the candidate will be required to have an outgoing personality as well as technical acumen to compile solutions with fine attention to detail. The candidate has to be a team player as well as being able to work autonomously to create solutions.

The role requires to work with closely vendors, suppliers and ADB PreSales and ADB technical to provide speedy turnaround of solutions and proposals.

The ideal candidate will be an experienced in Pre-Sales with a proven track record of winning business and guiding clients through the entire client acquisition process.

Requires 8-12 Years of experience in end to end pre-sales on high net worth deals and comes from Solution Owner / Enterprise Architecture background

Ideal Competencies:

Experience in Pre-Sales, ability to understand customer pain points, requirements and translate these into a winning solution approach, responding to RFPs for infrastructure and cloud solutions and services

Strong client facing and communication skills and capable to independently think, conduct customer workshops articulate and comprehend customer pain points in technology and commercial areas for providing solutions

Hands-on Public/Private cloud infrastructure design and deployment experience in enterprise organizations

Good knowledge towards cloud transformation and migration engagements.

Excellent understanding of various cloud technologies- Azure, AWS, and VMWare on AWS

Proven track record and accurate solutions estimations in:

Data Centre and Storage solutions

Backup Solutions

Hyperconverged Solutions

Cloud infrastructure design - including network topology and security considerations

Automation and Configuration management

Cloud consumption and economics

Excellent soft-skills particularly in client expectation management

Ability to articulate to both technical/non-technical stakeholders for RFPs and customers

Vendor Interactions (NetApp, VMWare, Veeam, Nutanix, Cisco, Pure Storage, and others)

Good understanding of various IaaS platforms including Virtualisation (VMware, Hyper-V, Openstack etc) as well as other public/private and hybrid cloud technology stacks (e.g. Hyper -converged systems, Azure Stack,).

Good understanding of software-defined infrastructure for different OEMs, like Cisco, DELL -EMC, VMWare, NetApp etc

Good Multi Operating System /Hypervisor knowledge: Windows, Linux OS, ESXi, Hyper V services along with storage management, SAN, NAS, Backup, Security, etc)

Experience architecting or deploying Cloud/Virtualization solutions in enterprise customers.

Outstanding presentation and communication skills, especially with senior level stakeholders

Experienced in eliciting requirements from formal and informal documents and conversations

Experience mapping RFI/RFP requirements to Services, Solutions and Offerings

Experience scoping, defining and commercializing value propositions

Ability to collaborate across the business where required

Be proficient in assessing options (e.g. risk, performance, cost-benefit) and informing decision-makers with persuasive visualisations based upon assessment outputs.

Experience architecting or deploying Cloud/Virtualization solutions in enterprise customers.

A solid foundation in developing innovative GTM propositions, Customer Solutions, commercial proposition are key pre-requisites.

Advantageous Competencies:

Previous PreSales experience in the ICT sector with have working knowledge of vendors and suppliers.

Additional Requirements:

Driver’s License and own transport

EducationNational Diploma: Information Technology (Required)

LanguagesEnglish

R-8482