Seth Lynch ⋅ Plano, TX Hewlett Packard ⋅ 15 years experience

Darren,

The great thing about the technology space is there are no right or wrong answers, so in that vein, I'll give you some of the ways you can look at cloud and cyber security verticals. This isn't the only way to look at it but a decent way to classify big industries.

In the cloud space, you can look at it in 4 big chunks. Infrastructure, Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and SaaS.

Infrastructure is the hardware that clouds runs on whether a public cloud or private cloud. There's a lot of iron in these cloud. Major infrastructure players are HPE, Dell, Cisco, IBM, Lenovo, Supermicro, etc. Infrastructure also includes public data centers that provide the space, power, and cooling for this infrastructure if a company does not want to build a cloud on their property.

Public Cloud are shared or multi-tenant offerings. These are the offerings of companies like AWS, Azure (Microsoft), Google Cloud, Oracle, and some other niche players. Public cloud usually means the companies have publically available offerings that are easily accessible to the smallest to largest companies. Lots of nuances in this space but in general the public cloud segment focuses on providing infrastructure, development platforms, and software using multi-tenancy which means shared resources across multiple customers.

Private Clouds are stood up for a single company's use. Most large enterprises have private clouds now. Companies like IBM, Deloitte, Accenture, HCL, PWC, and many others have groups that build, operate, or support these types of clouds.

SaaS or Software as a Service focuses on companies that offer cloud based software packages. All the public clouds have SaaS offerings but also many other companies build SaaS products and market them to businesses. The biggest factor in the SaaS vertical is they are offering something on a subscription basis and the software is being provided on a cloud environment and not on a PC or on-site server. These are companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Workday, SAP, Oracle, Adobe, etc. This is also usually where you find Customer Success teams like you mention.

Each of these companies typically have account managers, product specialists, and solutions engineers/architects/designers in their sales teams. Account managers are assigned individual or large accounts. Product specialists are sales people that sell only a specific portion of the portfolio but likely support many accounts or territories. They know the products they sell top to bottom. Solutions engineers support the account managers or product specialists when putting together the specific technology to meet a customers need whether it is a BOM or a full end-to-end architecture.

Finally, success teams come into play usually after a sale is made and are usually found in SaaS or subscription based companies. They are there to make sure the customer knows how to use the product and spend most of their time explaining higher level features (typically premium features) of the product to help grow revenue within the account. They are usually seen as a hybrid customer satisfaction / sales function.

Will Lukang ⋅ Wyckoff, NJ UBS ⋅ 30 years experience

Hi Darren,

I suggest taking course on the different areas that you're interested in. This way, you'll gain insight on the topic and develop your knowledge on it. On Sales, account roles and customer success, do you have a profile on linkedin? If you do, I can make an introduction to people who are performing those roles, this way you can connect and gain insights on those area.

If you like, I can setup a call for us to discuss about my background.

Thank you very much for your service.

Regards,
Will Lukang

Darren Paladino ⋅ Parker, CO U.S. Air Force, Colonel ⋅ 27 years served

Thank you for these helpful responses Seth and Will. The two paths I am thinking about are SaaS and then the risk aspect which may cover all these areas.

I am about 7,500 points into Salesforce.com Trailhead with the Business Analyst trail mix behind me and the Admin cert program started. My plan is to add a few more certifications, without going too far before narrowing down these areas.

Regards,

Darren
http://www.linkedin.com/in/darren-paladino