You recently stepped into the role of VP of Customer Success, what does that entail?

As the title implies, a lot of interfacing with our customers! In a nutshell, it means making sure our worldwide customers are getting what they need from Instaclustr, whether that’s on the technical side, contract renewal, migrations, etc. My involvement can start as early as the pre-sales process, to help determine what an organization’s requirements are and which of our features and managed solutions can best fit those needs. I’m also working with existing customers all over the world to identify how their requirements change as they grow with us, and how we can support them to scale. As they say, a happy customer is a loyal customer, and it’s certainly a major part of my job to ensure we are not just meeting, but exceeding expectations.

When customers first turn to Instaclustr, what’s the most common challenge they are trying to solve?

Many of our customers come to us fully aware of the power inherent to open source technologies like Apache Cassandra and Kafka, but either lack the internal expertise or time – or both – to make these solutions work for them in the most efficient and optimized ways. We make those headaches go away, and enable customers to focus their engineering staff on building applications.

Another common reason we see customers reaching out is for help solving new challenges as they scale. They are at a point where they are experiencing (or expecting to experience) increased user demand on their applications, and want to ensure their clusters can handle that growth.

Why did a career in technology appeal to you?

It was a fairly natural choice of career for me as I enjoyed math and physics in school and always toyed with computers in my spare time as a kid – and then majored in software engineering at The Australian National University. I really enjoy this industry and I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else, even though most people are surprised about my job when they first meet me.

What brought you to Instaclustr?

I’ve been at Instaclustr since 2014 – one of the first employees, in fact. I had previously spent about a decade engaged in technical consulting to large government departments. I was ready for a change to something more dynamic and with more growth potential, and I found Instaclustr. I spent a year as a Developer building out our core infrastructure, before moving across to head up our Technical Operations team. Five years later, it’s exciting to see how far we’ve come.

What’s your favorite aspect about working at Instaclustr?

I think staffing choices have been consistently solid, which makes it fun to come to work. The company has always maintained a clear vision of where we want to be and how we want to get there, and that’s manifested itself in hiring smart folks who genuinely believe in Instaclustr’s mission.

I also really enjoy all the visibility my role allows me to get into what customers are working on. Around the world, from organizations big and small, it’s been really interesting to see the applications that people are coming up with and the problems they have set out to solve.