Verticals Experience

Dan's second-longest period of dedicated customer involvement (~2.5 years) was covering a global client in the EDA sector (chip design and manufacture) as a field sales technologist. He worked with the technologists in the engineering, manufacturing and marketing arms of the client very closely, and he worked peripherally with their internal IT technologists. In addition to that primary client, at an earlier point in time Dan had worked on the corporate product side representing his company's product in a project for a competitor EDA company.

Dan's experience has brought him insight into some of the technology needs of EDA companies, particularly in the engineering space where very high performance and reliability is very important, and the manufacturing space where processes required very high performance, very high scalability, and very high reliability. Even one minute of manufacturing downtime for an EDA customer equates to an enormous amount of revenue missed so understandably reliability was a non-negotiable requirement, leading to often long proof-of-concept times and slow rollouts of changes.

Dan's longest period of dedicated customer involvement (~6.5 years) was covering a very large client in the Apparel sector as a field sales technologist. This role gave Dan a lot of insight into the needs of sportswear and apparel brands, and into running sales campaigns for a broad array of product offerings and architecting solutions with many technology stack layers. He worked with a diverse array of application teams within IT, Design, Retail, and Digital Marketing. In this capacity he focused up and down the entire IT stack, including cloud offerings and the hybrid use of cloud technologies.

Dan has worked on projects in various capacities for financial companies, including projects for some of the world's largest financial institutions and for smaller niche institutions. He's seen needs from the privacy requirements mandated by governments to the continuous availability and capacity needed for transaction processing to high performance trading and analysis needs to technology and data security mandates. 

Dan served some clients in the Aerospace and Defense sector, serving as a product engineering liaison to the field sales teams. He's gained insight into the needs of these organizations, including their needs for scale and performance and their often very strict security requirements driven by government contract requirements and clearance/secrecy mandates.

In the healthcare vertical, Dan supported some projects for companies both small and large. One of the predominant and driving needs seen in that space was government-mandated privacy alongside the need for uptime. Of course, there are many other technology needs ranging from high performance and capacity imaging and analytical to traditional IT needs, but all of them share the common thread of privacy requirements just as the financial sector projects all must meet the financial data privacy requirements set by governments.

One interesting consideration seen really can apply to most verticals, but it related to the challenge of meeting a changing landscape of data privacy and retention requirements while also satisfying "proveable authenticity" needs - such as with "write-once read-many" records that have storage-enforced retention periods. That crosses over into the legal needs of companies as well, who often want to see provable technology-assisted enforcement of data retention and deletion policies.

Dan worked on or consoluted in projects for governments at national/federal and state and local levels, with the predominant interactions being at the federal level. This exposed him to the strict security requirements of some branches of government (like Military and Intelligence). Some of very interesting and thought-provoking needs arose from this space. Dan also saw that as a vendor it can be tough to meet the needs of everyone equally at the same time, as all of those needs require investment and resources. Satisfying the strict requirements of government security requirements, for example, may pay off in few other verticals except those that contract in the strict areas of government (like Aerospace and Defense.)

A fun and personally interesting local-level project, Dan helped his local sales team on when he was a corporate engineering liason was a police body cam project for a city government. While not a huge project, it was something that is needed in city after city - and this was back in the days where storage capacities were much more limited, wifi wasn't so plentiful and gigabit networking was predominantly in the data center.