Hi everyone, I’m Will Usher and I currently live in Glastonbury, CT and work as a virtualization architect for IBM Global Services.
Professional Career
IBM Global Services
I was brought on-board by IBM to serve as the virtualization architect for the Fortune 500 financial services company, Ameriprise Financial Inc.
It has been a great experience for me to be able to architect such a large, mission critical environment. My biggest challenge at Ameriprise is to shift the mentality that virtualization is just about consolidation ratios and bringing existing process to the virtualized world, to one that embraces automation and leverages the flexibility that the virtualization layer can provide.
F3 Technology Partners
My first job out of college was F3 Technology Partners, a company I worked at between 2008-2010. At F3, my time was split between pre-sales and post-sales engineering. My two main areas of expertise are VMware virtualization and storage, as well as being well rounded in both the Microsoft stack and *NIX systems.
I am involved in researching emerging technologies and strategizing how they can help F3′s clients increase the value of IT in their business. While at F3, I engineered a solution around delivering IT as a service “Cloud” that I believe can greatly benefit our clients.
I enjoy managing projects from start to finish, and find that watching all the pieces come together to form a complete project a very rewarding experience.
Education
University of Massachusetts
While studying computer science at UMass, I was selected by one of my professors to join his graduate research group as a research assistant due to my performance in his class and my involvement in extracurricular activities around IP networking. The research work was very interesting, revolving around wireless mesh networking.
Manchester Community College
My studies in higher education began at Manchester Community College, a great community college located in Manchester Connecticut. My best experiences came from the opportunities I was given outside of the classroom from the professors, staff, and other students. I volunteered my time supporting the IT environment in the Center for Business and Technology, where many of my technical classes were held. I gained invaluable real world experience supporting an IT infrastructure and working within a group of people with drastically different personalities and viewpoints. One achievement I feel particularly proud of was a project to update our a systems management software. When deciding on a solution, I strongly influenced the decision to switch vendors in order to align our solution with the greater colleges solution. After the purchasing decision was made I took responsibility for installing and configuring the solution for our labs.
During my time at MCC, I also spent some time working the department of IT. The technical projects were interesting, including a project that distributed virtual machine images to classrooms, and based on the room it was deployed in, would automatically (via a python script) configure the VM, including assigning a unique computer name and mapping the correct printers. Two things really stood out to me during my time there; the team was very funny and I don’t think I went a day without getting a good laugh, and everybody that I interacted with seemed to enjoy doing what they were responsible for. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I now understand that it was not through blind luck that worked out the way it did, but rather good management matching employee skills and desires with job function. I credit the two managers above me, Jason Blosser and Edgar Chavarriaga, for making the team work as well as it did.