E83 - Betal Ozkan at Presidio

Coming up on this episode of The Route to Networking podcast, our Head of Enterprise USA Harry Green was joined by Betal Ozkan, the Principal Architect at Presidio. Betal talks to us about his career progression as well as what he is seeing as the biggest customer demands at the moment.

From a young age, Betal always had an interest in computers he just didn’t know what it was. He wasn’t a person who had a well-defined plan from a young age, he describes his experience starting organically with a bit of luck.

Taking you back to his college days, Betal started to see a common trend of people taking their CCNA courses. At that time, he was gearing more towards a different path into more infrastructure-based roles. He soon noticed that there were a lot of challenges that came down that route. There was no open source, books, or public information to be able to learn it. This was frustrating for Betal, as when he wanted to learn something, he wanted the information to be accessible. This led him into the Cisco world and was a huge turning point for him. He realised how easy it was to learn something if you put your mind to it.

He landed his first role at Silverbull Software after they were looking for someone fresh out of college. His role was a consultant helping other consultants. He learned what the products they sell do and how things work. From there he flew through the industry working for some impressive names in the space such as Fortinet and AWS.

Principal Architect @ Presidio…

As the Principal Architect at the very prestigious Presidio, he is part of the post-sales organisation. He helps their customers design, configure, and migrate any technology with which they are working. He helps lead and guide the customer and he works closely with the Account teams and Solution Architects.

Some of the demands he is hearing increasingly of are all about best practices. The customer wants to know what is best for their infrastructure, but they don’t know where to start. This leads to great conversations and gives him the option to guide them in the right direction, allowing him to learn a lot about the customer, their environment, and the outcomes they want to achieve.

The interview concludes, which only means one thing…

Our quick-fire rounds! Tune in to the full episode to hear some great answers.