Q&A with Andrew Dean, OCF Sales Director
In our next Q&A blog to celebrate our 20th anniversary, sales director, Andrew Dean, reflects on some of the company’s achievements and how the business has evolved along with the HPC environment over the past 20 years.
When did you join OCF and what was your role when you first started at the company?
I joined OCF in the summer of 2007, straight from studying computing at the University of Wales Aberystwyth (as it was called then). I was hired as part of a graduate scheme run by IBM and Bell Micro, called the IBM Storage Academy. The purpose of the IBM Storage Academy was to develop more IBM storage skills in the channel partner network. As part of this graduate scheme, I did a huge amount of training with IBM and its partners including Cisco, LSI and NetApp over the course of a year.
I also received a lot of first-hand experience of OCF’s implementation processes by helping deliver systems and working on deployments with the OCF engineering team when I wasn’t away on IBM courses. When I graduated the IBM Storage Academy, I moved into the pre-sales team, which was made up of two of us at the time.
What is your role now?
I am sales director which involves managing three business functions at OCF, sales, pre-sales and marketing. I worked in the sales team for seven years before becoming the Sales Director and I’ve been at OCF for coming up to 15 years.
What achievements of OCF are you most proud of?
For me, it’s the way we’ve been able to continually evolve and develop our skills and offerings to keep up with a growing and maturing market. Personally, I’m really proud of our managed services offerings; a service we didn’t have three years ago but is quickly become a core OCF offering. We now have a dedicated and growing managed services team and have received excellent feedback from our customers who are really benefitting from this service.
OCF has been involved in too many exciting projects to name individually, with solutions often using the ‘first’ of a technology, whether that is servers, storage, networking or an accelerator from an innovative start-up. Of course, being the first sometimes means we’ll come across challenges that we’ve never seen before and I’m proud of how our team of engineers, working closely with our partners and customers, can put their heads together to achieve the required outcomes.
I feel OCF is an important part of the UK HPC community, by being involved in user groups and engaging with partners, customers and hopefully shortly a local college to develop HPC knowledge, skills and maybe even the next generation of HPC engineers. This makes me proud that we are more than ‘just’ a commercial company.
What did the HPC environment look like 20 years ago and how has it progressed over the years?
Since I started at OCF, there has been a major shift from clusters being used at a departmental or user group level, to now being service type clusters which are used at an institutional level. Clusters today will often have hundreds of different applications and users. These institutions and users now expect ‘enterprise’ levels of up-time, reliability and level of service. This also applies to more general research computing and storage, not just HPC. OCF has been working both subconsciously and consciously to meet these growing requirements.
Initially, university HPC environments were used for a limited number of applications, but over the years the user base has grown considerably and HPC has become a central resource for researchers from any kind of discipline. Particularly with the uptake of AI and machine learning, the floodgates have opened for user cases of HPC. The older HPC systems would have been used for not only one user group but also for one purpose as well, now we have much bigger environments to service every kind of discipline needing to access the storage and compute capabilities of HPC.
How has the company and/or customer needs changed in your view over the past 20 years?
As projects have become larger and more complex and expectations have increased around how fast these projects need to be delivered and what needs to be included, the delivery and integration processes have become a lot more formalised. Project managers are now engaged on every single project with formal statement of works, risk registers and so on. All of which are a vital part of our business to make sure that we're delivering exactly what our customers want.
Support and managed services have also now become such an important part of our business. Our customers will most often have service level agreements with their users, so if they're going to commit to a certain amount of uptime, then their suppliers and partners need to align and help them achieve their SLAs.
A lot of our customers want to spend more time helping their users utilise the HPC system well, so they can maximise their research or business outcomes. This gives us the opportunity to help these customers with the more mundane day to day management tasks of the HPC environment, whilst freeing up their time to help their users directly.
What’s in store for this year and any big predictions?
We’re always keeping a watching brief on new technologies around HPC, storage, HPC in the cloud, AI and machine learning. It won’t be an overnight change, but cloud and containerisation are increasingly being considered and used in HPC environments along with new and novel storage and accelerator technologies. Users are demanding hybrid, heterogenous HPC environments that offer all these technologies and services – the challenge will be to offer all of this, without adding complexity for users or administrators.
I also expect to see AI and machine learning as areas of continued growth for us - this will bring with it a growing userbase of ‘new’ HPC users that will bring different requirements and challenges.