Technology Evangelism Experience

Dan served as a technology evangelist for many years as a representative of a technology company. 

His evangelism experience ranged from internal (within the vendor or vendor landscape) to external (client/end user), and from product (SME-level) to portfolio (architect-level). Today he's also familiar with media technologies, and those are things he would seek to leverage in technology evangelism.

Dan represented the "technological face of his company" to his clients for many years. As such, he became a go-to person for needs across the spectrum of technologies his company and partner companies developed and sold. At first that focused on data storage and protection, virtualization (VMware), and cloud deployment (Pivotal) technologies plus a handful of others through partners or acquisitions. 

When Dell Technologies acquired EMC Corporation, that portfolio of technologies became vastly larger - including end-user/client, server, security (Secureworks, RSA), application and data integration (Boomi), cloud management and health (VMware), infrastructure as a service (Virtustream), and many others through the wide variety of Dell Technologies partners. That list changed over time, of course, and many of them would have their own sales teams but Dan was tasked with having an understanding of all of them and being able to identify opportunities to position them within the client.

Portfolio evangelism - understanding at a high level, messaging, positioning, and representing a portfolio of technologies and products - is something Dan us familiar with and frankly something he enjoys! 

Dan's approach to thinking is high and wide... he can go deep as he does have the capacity to do so, but what he enjoys is that "10,000 foot view": bringing the whole puzzle together rather than conentrating on the fit of a few specific pieces.

For approximately six to eight years (beginning around 2005) Dan represented a product or small set of products to his clients. During this time his clients were both internal (within his company) and external (customers/clients.) He participated at the engineering level with development, product management, product marketing, and business operations. He also participated at the sales level, teaching people within his company about the products he represented, teaching clients to use it, and helping field sales understand and sell it to clients.  He helped drive product development based on client needs, and he worked with marketing to communicate product value.

Dan actually is a co-inventor on a patented idea that he and engineering worked together on in response to a client need at the tail end of this period of Dan's career. It is during this period of time that Dan figured out he loves to explain and share good news that helps people meet their needs.

His focus during this period of time was product-centric (or product category centric). He went narrow in scope and deep in expertise during that time... crossing the line between product engineering and field sales. He took intimate knowledge of the product and turned it into messaging that helped those who sold or used it.

That is product evangelism in a nutshell: communicating the benefits of a product or product category to its various consumers or potential consumers.

Dan is good at this because he is able to understand the technology and communicate it well. He is able to speak in different language based on his audience: internal subject matter experts, developers, field sales, marketing, product managers, management, clients, and business/executive. As he moved deeper into sales from 2011 on, his ability to communicate to mid- and senior-level people within his clients increased because he learned more of their perspective and lingo.

If you need a product evangelist, Dan can help you. For the right product it may be something he'd enjoy doing again!

While Dan has not directly walked in the role of an evangelist for an overall technology (not specific to one vendor), he would be excellent in this role and actually would prefer this kind of role.

An example of this type of evangelism would be the championing of a new way to interface with systems - one that can and is being implemented by multiple vendors. Think of the role that ICANN  plays for advocating and advancing the addressing of systems across the internet. (Admittedly, that no longer needs much "selling"... we're pretty used to that already.)

Or think of a company or non-profit that develops a new idea for building, packaging, distributing, and running technology that can be implemented by many vendors. Containers and Docker's role in championing them is a good example...  Docker evangelized container technology, but today you can implement containers through Docker or a number of other container management technologies.

Said company or non-profit or standards body is developing or has developed an amazing new technology that may seem years ahead of its time to users, and it needs to get the word out about how this technology is going to disrupt the technology landscape and bring blessing to those who use or implement the technologies we consume. Now what? 

Enter the technology evangelist: understand the technology, understand how it becomes a blessing when implemented, understand the immediate trade-offs to successfully overcome barriers to adoption, and "go tell it on the mountain" to spread the word.

You see, Dan is also an evangelist in his faith: he spreads good news of the love and kingdom of God in Jesus Christ. Telling good news is in his DNA. He loves to make people's lives better, and one way to do that is practically through the proper and good use of technology.