Glenn Dekheyser

The ATM is there to give you that vehicle to, first of all, get the information from the people who are creating that technology, being in the room, so to speak.

You're not actually in the room.

You're in the room next to the room.

but it's close enough and you actually can have an impact.

If you have experiences and you need to talk to the specific person to have direct impact into fixing that or get input or give them input, the A-Team is a great vehicle for that.

Now, the A-Team is also a great vehicle for your own personal brand management.

If you're a blogger, if you do a lot of tweeting or whatever that's called these days, posting, I guess.

X-ing, whatever.

Crossing.

I do, just LinkedIn posting is what I do now.

They had a different word for it and I wasn't happy with the word, so I didn't use it.

But also to the internal impact, if you want to have an external impact and you can get that stuff out there.

And what the NetApp AT does is amplify your presence online to make sure that the people know that you're an expert.

And it really helped.

It helped my career tremendously.

Yeah, it's not a huge community.

It's one of those things where you really have to be someone who understands not just what NetApp does, but also why they do it, why they made these choices, and what's the value proposition to the customer for having this particular feature set or doing things this way versus this way.

more than just oh yeah i'm an ncda it's more than that because anybody can pass a test well not anybody but the point is that this is for if you're passionate about it and that's really the key all the folks who've been on the net up a team over the years have all had a passion for what they do and some of those meetings especially with product some of them got heated because the people who were the a team folks would get pretty

I don't want to say angry, but when they were talking to some product folks, especially when Flash first came out, there was certainly some heated conversations, not because anybody wanted to yell at somebody, but customers need things and you have the ability to get that to them.

And so these people are really passionate about customer outcomes in general.