Executive Architect

Job Description

Are you data-driven? We at NetApp believe in the transformative power of data – to expand customer touchpoints, to foster greater innovation, and to optimize operations. We are designed for simplicity, optimized to protect, created to embrace future opportunity, and open to enrich choice. We are the data authority for hybrid cloud, and we are helping our customers realize the full potential of their data.

We’ve built a Data Fabric for a data-driven world – to simplify and integrate data management across the resources that are best for the business. With the Data Fabric, our customers can harness the power of cloud data services, build cloud infrastructures, and modernize storage through data management.

NetApp’s need for this new pre-sales role is driven by the rapid changes in the needs of customer IT executives and in the IT business model. NetApp’s path to growth is found in becoming the preferred supplier by both the IT staff and the executives who control the decisions.
The Executive Architect engages with Enterprise and Service Provider customer executives to provide pre-sales consulting as a trusted business and IT advisor. The role gains deep insight into the customer’s business objectives and collaboratively leads both customer executives and the NetApp account team to create IT service strategies, designs, implementation, and operations capabilities to achieve those objectives.
The Executive Architect role exists to increase NetApp revenue growth from Enterprise and Service Provider accounts, helping the sales team to achieve and surpass their sales goals. This role contributes to NetApp revenue growth by increasing NetApp’s share of customer’s IT expense. This role is measured by NetApp revenue growth.
The Executive Architect’s key strategy is to create trust and collaboration so that the relationship with NetApp transforms from a buyer-vendor relationship to a strategic partnership to achieve the customer’s business objectives. The Executive Architect functions from the perspective of walking in the customer executive’s shoes as an advocate of their objectives to increase revenue, profitability, market share, performance, agility, and efficiency. As an advisor to IT executives, the Executive Architect helps customer IT executives to meet business needs and transition to the service provider IT business model. As such, the Executive Architect helps the customer transition from an operator of assets to a provider of services to the business and its customers.
The Executive Architect creates trusted strategic partnerships through engagements with outcomes that are rapidly delivered with short time to value and very high impact. The Executive Architect seeks to reduce the cycle time of business processes to increase agility, speed, and predictability of business and IT outcomes.
The purpose of the Executive Architect role is to enable the focus on customer outcomes and NetApp revenue growth. Customers expect this role to be a pre-sales investment from NetApp. This pre-sales role allows the necessary agility and responsiveness in response to changing customer needs. The Executive Architect seeks to deliver well-defined and repeatable consulting methods to enable the highest impact in the least time.
ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:
Customer-facing pre-sales engagement
Collaboration with Account Sales Teams and Services Teams
Internal/Administrative

This is a rare high skill role that requires a skill set similar to that of an IT executive and who leads by influence and thrives under high accountability to deliver results
• Able to pass the customer’s IT practitioner credibility tests to create trust that you have walked in the customer’s shoes
• Able to function like an entrepreneur running your own business inside NetApp
• Able to independently and collaboratively function in ambiguous low-structure environments, creating the programs, roles, processes, and plans as needed for the outcomes required
• Able to identify, qualify, and prioritize opportunities through account team and customer interactions
• Able to confidently lead executive level conversations and forums about IT strategy, design, transition, and operations
• Extremely adept at using ITIL v3 to inform and guide service lifecycle design and management without requiring the customer to understand it.
• Able to define, design, and deliver high impact executive and architecture level consulting activities and engagements with specific actionable outcomes, compressing weeks or months of normal customer effort to hours or days
• Able to design the service architecture platforms for IT infrastructure services, including the practical details of designing storage platforms for application storage and data management requirements with surrounding dependencies on networks, servers, applications, reporting, and automation frameworks
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills; comfortable as a leader or player
• Excellent project team management skills who can manage people and tasks
• Excellent analytical and problem solving abilities who can develop complex spreadsheets and scripts for short-term analysis and problem-solving
• Able to travel up to 70%
SCOPE OF RESPONSIBILITY, IMPACT OF DECISIONS AND DEGREE OF SUPERVISION:
This is a global role as some accounts will be global in scope. The impact of decisions and actions should be significant increases in revenue to NetApp.
The Executive Architect is expected to plan and execute all aspects of account engagement independently without direction in collaboration with each account sales team.

• A minimum of 20 years of IT industry experience is required, including 10 years as an IT leader with people and budget responsibilities or 10 years consulting with CIO level executives for large global enterprise programs
• A Computer Science/Engineering/Architecture/Software degree or equivalent science degree
• A Business degree or equivalent experience
• ITIL v3 certification or equivalent applied practitioner experience
• Familiar with Enterprise Architecture concepts and frameworks such as Gartner, TOGAF, etc.
• Project Management Certification or equivalent applied practitioner experience in leading large complex global programs and projects in enterprise contexts
• Experiencing in designing and managing storage for applications
• Experience leading in at least two technical towers (Servers, Networks, Storage, Applications, Middleware, Directory, etc)

So get ready to tap into the data visionary within, and join us as we accelerate digital transformation and empower our customers to change the world with data!

If you ask a NetApp employee why they work here, the answer is inevitably the same: the people. At NetApp, our culture is at the heart of what we do. We place importance in trust, integrity, teamwork, and caring above all else. NetApp is a place where people are empowered to make a difference. Empowered to innovate. Empowered to collaborate. Empowered to help ourselves and others be data-driven and change the world. We take care of each other, our customers, our partners, and our communities simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Join us and see what empowerment can do.