Title:  EMEA Solutions Architect

Job Summary

As an EMEA Solutions Architect you will utilize your strong technical competencies and customer service orientation to provide the highest level of technical consultation to sales teams to support sales goals. You will work on cross-functional teams including Sales, Product Marketing, Services and Engineering to create a strategy that provides the best solutions to customers. You will become intimately acquainted with the customer's business requirements, technical needs, systems, environment and service history, enabling you to present targeted business solutions.

Essential Functions

Solutions Architects work with NetApp potential customers and the EMEA Account/Sales Teams by providing expertise in the following areas: 

• Work closely with sales as a consultant to understand prospect's technical needs related to a specific product or market.
• Perform consultative selling of optimum support and system solutions.
• Manage and evolve a comprehensive technology collaboration and support.
• Provide technical consultation/education to the Sales team and keep them apprised on new product information.
• Participate in customer evaluations and proof of concepts for deploying test systems.
• Plan, conduct and direct projects to support sales efforts and address future customer needs. Project plan includes costs, staffing, technical leadership and project evaluation.
• Keep apprised of all new product features and fixes.

Job Requirements

• Expert in the HCG (Hybrid Cloud Group) products and the EMEA market.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills. 
• Good interpersonal communication and customer service skills are needed in order work successfully with prospects, customers, partners, and cross functional teams to meet sales goals.
• Account management and project management experience.
• Strong aptitude for learning new technologies and understanding how to utilize them in a customer facing environment. 
• Ability to follow standard engineering principles and practices.
• Creative approach to problem solving.
• Travel to the prospective customer's domestic sites and other global sites as necessary.

Responsibility & Interaction

Responsibility:

• As a seasoned professional with a wide range of experiences, this individual uses professional concepts and company objectives to resolve complex issues in creative and effective ways.
• Is responsible for a specific geographical install base and large, complex, high visibility, strategic, or tactically important accounts. 

Interaction:

An EMEA SA spends his or her day listening to and internalizing customer requirements, then helping them to understand how the NetApp portfolio can help their teams to deliver a cloud like experience for customers while allowing operators to retain control of the company’s most valuable asset, their data. This includes a deep understanding of how the various on-prem and cloud products weave together to form the data fabric, articulating the value that these tools bring to the customer’s environment as well as staying abreast of industry trends to act as a consultant to the customer. 

Further Skills

• Successfully identifying and articulating the technical and business requirements to create winning proposals in conjunction with your sales, services and support team.
• Lead product demonstrations and proof of concepts with our customers providing them the ability to experience simplicity and value of NetApp solutions.
• Understand financial and operational requirements to help create ROI models that meet the customer’s needs.
• Creation and execution of Technical Account Plans to align resources to customer’s needs that results in successful implementation of NetApp solutions, deeper relationships and better understanding of NetApp’s products and services.
• Active participation in Field Specialist teams that drive initiatives and provide input to product and engineering organizations.
• Maintaining currency on complimentary and competitive emerging technologies like cloud usage and adoption, cloud architectures, developer environments (DevOps), automation, software defined datacentres, IaaS, VDI, databases (in a VM), Containers, Docker/Kubernetes
• Engaging subject matter experts to help develop and present solutions when needed.

Education & Experience

• 8 to 12 years of experience is preferred.    
• A Bachelor of Arts or Sciences Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent is required.  A Graduate Degree is desired.
• Experience in selling into virtualized environments, cloud infrastructures, private/public/hybrid cloud
• Understand future datacentre architectures, automation, DevOps, End user compute environments.
• Specialized knowledge in breadth and/or depth.
• VMware / AWS / Azure / Google certification is helpful.