Meet Chris Cordova: Pre-Sales Engineer
With over 25 years of experience in the engineering, DoD, and IC sectors, Chris brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to our team as our IT Modernization Lead.
Professional Background:
Chris is a USAF veteran with a strong background in enterprise data center modernization, infrastructure management, and high-performance computing. He is currently expanding his expertise in Zero Trust principles, SecDevOps, AI/ML solutioning, and network modernization principles.
What Brought You to idt.?
“I learned a while ago that to continue to grow, you have to expand your experience and challenge yourself to be comfortable with the uncomfortable. idt. offered me the opportunity to start and grow in a new field, Presales System Engineering.”
What Has Surprised You Working at idt.?
“How important relationships and execution are to the business. When you’re a Technical Account Manager or Customer Success Executive you understand the customer operational journey, in a sales role you must know where your customer is going and how to relate industry to their operational models.
Execution is key because in a lot of ways that is your brand to your customer.”
Daily Role and Impact:
“As a Presales Engineer my day-to-day is to architect solutions, build BOMs, and relay these to customers in terms that they can understand to help them make decisions on their next generation of solutions. I also help with identifying where we may need partnerships to augment our capabilities.
My goal is to provide an end-to-end lifecycle solution that is customer experience led with a mission focus.”
How Does your role impact idt.’s mission?
“My job is to be a trusted advisor to all our lines of business and customers.
At the end of the day our solutions must exceed the customer’s expectations/requirements, showcase value and drive innovation. If we fail in any of these areas we miss our opportunity. The pace of innovation advances so quickly and staying current and certified on technologies is critical to that success.
Lastly, we have the privilege of simplify the complex. Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Pillar-Specific Insights:
Area of Interest: Infrastructure Management
“I know it’s a popular topic right now, but hear me out…
Consider all the factors of managing all these resources in a hybrid environment with on-prem and cloud resources. Asset identification, deployment, integration, management and maintenance of hardware and software, decommissioning and integrating new technologies into this environment without impact to the existing, while also factoring in security, financial and business process impacts.
One of our main goals is to help address those challenges through tools and automation.”
Challenges of Data Center Modernization:
“The vastness of the topic.
Data center Modernization covers a wide area of technical expertise from compute, storage, networking, edge, AI/ML, and cooling facilities. And it is a challenge that every customer evolves to.
We want our customers to know they can rely on our expertise, evaluations, relationships, and ultimately that we are on this journey with them. We don’t know their environment as well as they do, it truly is a team effort.
Innovation often comes with a learning curve and change is hard in any organization. How we propose our solutions must make sense technically, financially and have a way to get from today (as-is) to tomorrow (to-be) with reduced complexity.”
Benefits of Data Center Modernization:
“Data center modernization means evaluating where you are today (as-is) against where you want to go tomorrow (to-be). And the journey can often be hard.
Additionally, every Federal organization is faced with budget and human resource constraints. In every organization you must maintain and overcome more with less that leads to automation and innovation. If you consider a typical CAPEX incident response workflow today and walk through the notification, identification, remediation, acknowledgement and return to service while factoring in physical touch labor you can see why OPEX models are overwhelming successful.
IT is a commodity and part of the larger overall business of how you expand, contract, and use your resources which are all financially accountable. Once you get to the state of evaluating business outcomes over use case requirements you can start to identify where this makes the most sense for your mission and business.”
Contact Us:
Learn how idt. can help you with your IT Modernization needs.
Pre-Sales Engineer:
IT Modernization Lead