I’m pleased to be able to say that I’ll be joining Citrix in July 2016.

I’ll be moving away from “pure” IT support and into an internal sysadmin/software tester role within the Citrix Interoperability Team. Their job is to regularly stand up the latest builds of the entire Citrix portfolio and ensure it all works smoothly and, if it doesn’t, work to help fix issues so that it does.

I’m looking forward to this for a number of reasons:

• New Technology: I’ll be learning ridiculous amounts of new technology in complex infrastructure environments (This may surprise you, given the role, but I have almost zero background in Citrix products 🙂 ).
• Closer to the product: I’ll be moving to an Engineering/R&D department, so will be learning Engineering workflow stuff like Agile and Kanban as well as being more closely involved in the product portfolio and (hopefully) improving it and other’s ability to implement it.
• Culture: Citrix’s culture is fairly well known, and I was very impressed with the people I met during talks. One thing in particular that really got me was the effort taken to setup and maintain talent pipelines to help feed the organisation – and I admire long term strategy/thinking like that.
• Mentorship potential: I’ll be shifting roles from one of the most junior staff in an IT org to a more senior role within a team. This excites me a lot, as one of my long-term career goals is to be able to mentor and provide some level of elder leadership/guidance 🙂 .
• That C word: Oh, and of course, I’ll be doing stuff with Cloud, which is nice.

But what about Broadcom?

Some of you may not know my position, but when Avago acquired Broadcom in February 2016, many in IT were put on “transition”. Effectively we were told we’d be made redundant at various stages throughout the 18 months after acquisition. My position will be redundant in February 2017. If I stayed until then, I’d get a nice pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but I’ve decided that the role with Citrix was too good of an opportunity to pass up.

I learned a lot at Broadcom, had some great managers and worked with frankly, a world-class group of global IT professionals who’d gladly throw themselves under a bus to help each other and the business to succeed. I wish them all well for the future, and I’d gladly work with any and all of them again (and who knows…)