HYCU’s mission is to build a safer world by harmonizing protection and visibility for all the world’s data.
We connected with Chris Geaghan to get a look at what a day in the life of a Sales Engineer at HYCU looks like.
In this video, Chris answers.
- What is your role and responsibilities?
- What does a typical day in the life look like?
- What attracted you to HYCU?
- Advice for someone looking to join the team
Video Transcript
My name is Chris Geaghan and I am a sales engineer at HYCU.
My primary responsibilities, obviously as part of the sales team, are to meet company quota goals for selling our software solutions.
Typically, what is involved with that role is supporting outside sales efforts. We’ve got commercial, enterprise, and small business segments of the business. I deal mostly with the enterprise and commercial, but sometimes I do get into the small as well. It really involves:
- Sitting with customers and listening to their problems.
- Mapping what their business needs are to what we can provide.
- Doing things like Requests for Proposals (RFP) answering.
- Proof of Concept (POC) is a big one.
- A lot of demos and a lot of technical discussions around our solution.
Usually, the week starts off with about roughly half of it scheduled already on the calendar. That can come from things that were built in as follow-ups from prior weeks. But there’s a chunk of the week that’s usually dynamic too, where things will come up all the time that I get pulled into. Whether it’s to help another team, or whether it’s answering specific questions, or sending customer questions to our engineering and solutions engineering people.
So, probably a third to a half of the day sometimes is just scheduled the day before or that day. So, it’s a mix of set meetings, of demos, of customer activities. Sometimes there can even be after-work events, happy hours with customers. There are other times when I’m on the road and going to customer sites as well as business partners. Sometimes we do events and we work events. Sometimes we go for educating and training our business partners as well, because we partner up quite a bit with Nutanix and Dell out there, and we support a lot of other software vendors. For example, I managed an event down in New York. And because we touch so many things in the cloud, there are often a lot of events that we are at. Sometimes we sponsor them, sometimes we just work the booths.
I’ve known about HYCU since their inception. I was actually at Nutanix for several years prior to this. Because I work out of the Boston area, and HYCU’s main headquarters is in Boston, I just knew about them for probably longer than a lot of other folks out in the world do. Still, a lot of people that don’t know who we are, so evangelization, I guess, is another part of the job.
People always assume—and I did this too—that just because it’s in the cloud, it doesn’t mean that they’re backing up your data. All they’re required to do is keep the lights on and give you the plumbing. Octa is one example. I came from a role-based access control and network security position in my last job at Nutanix, and we used Octa. It’s a pretty well-known industry standard, just like Entra ID is. I never really thought with my Octa even my developer account to back it up, that my information may not be there the way I had it set up.
Looking at the breadth of solutions and applications out there that HYCU can support, besides just Nutanix and AHV (which is still a big part of the business), it was attractive. Cyber resilience is another big piece of the security picture, right? It’s not the only thing, but there’s a lot of moving parts these days. I think the ability to effectively do cyber resilience and data protection across clouds, across public and private clouds of different types, was very interesting. You get to touch a lot of stuff.
My advice for candidates is: Always be learning. I think in this business it never stops anyway, regardless of where you work and what you do.
- Show interest and stay relevant with trends in the public cloud.
- If you aren’t familiar with Nutanix and HPE and how they do their business, it’d be good to brush up on that as well since that is a big piece of what we do in terms of our target market.
- Be familiar with data protection technologies even at a high level.
- Have a high to mid-level knowledge of how public cloud works and that the three hyperscalers is a big help or will be a big help to you as well.
