ORIGINALLY POSTED 24th March 2015

9,817 views on developerworks

I do have a good excuse this time for the short hiatus in posts, as things have been a bit more crazy than normal, but to be expected when you up and move the whole family, literally to the opposite side of the globe!

My wife was born in New Zealand and spent much of her youth there, with most of her family still living there. We’d always had a long term plan to sound out moving back there, and while I was attending the STG Symposiums in Melbourne and Auckland last year I had discussions with the local team about a potential job move.

Cutting a long and semi-tortuous (If I never have to fill another form in again, that will be too soon!) few months, everything fell into place and we arrived in Auckland a couple of weeks ago.

For those wondering, I am now part of the IBM ATS (Advanced Technical Support) team, covering the whole AP region, so from Japan down to New Zealand. Obviously I’m specialising in Storage Virtualization and supporting our customers from sales engagements through to actual implementation and ongoing day to day usage. In the UK I spent a large part of my time doing this indirectly anyway, many of you I have met at various pre-sales meetings or during support engagements.

I didn’t want to end up losing technical vitality, so as part of the negotiations for the new role, I maintain a close working relationship with the Hursley development team, actually still being partly funded by said team, so moving to more of a performance consultant role, and letting some fresh blood come in and work into the architect role with my help when needed.

The net is I plan to get back to much more regular updates on here, and will send post-cards from my travels, which will be quite frequent! I also should get even better insight into how people are using the products, and tips and tricks I come across along the way.

Meanwhile, if you had my email address, and are looking to contact me, replace the “uk” with “nz1” and it will get to me at my new New Zealand email.

I’ve already had grief on Facebook from folks back in the UK for posting pics, but we did go from 3 Celsius to 25 Celsius, and took the kids to the beach a few times before they started school, so here you go :