Services Solutions Architect

The Services Solutions Architect (SSA) is primarily responsible to lead the technical pre-sales engagement with customers through the following activities:

• Working in close partnership with the core sales, services sales and delivery teams to understand desired customer outcomes, technical objectives, and services requirements
• Design high level solutions to meet the business outcomes and IT objectives
• Development of Vision for the Solution, Strategy and Services Roadmaps
• Ability to think past individual products and create end to end solutions to meet the business outcomes
• Effectively communicate the proposed services architecture to the customer, partners and project teams to demonstrate its tangible value
• Ensure that proposals, services solution designs and Statements Of Work are technically sound, deliverable, competitive and representative of market leadership in the application of technology to addressing business outcomes
• Assist with the completion and response of customer issues RFI’s, RFQ’s and RFP’s
• Ownership of the technical components of the Statement of Work including pre-requisites, responsibilities, technical scaling factors, out of scope items etc.
• Accurately define role based Level Of Effort required to deliver the solution in line with VMware best practice and support guidelines
• Facilitate accurate, timely and efficient handover of projects from the sales phase to delivery
• Author blogs, technical articles and white papers based on experiences
• Speak at events such as VMworld, Sales Kick-Offs, Technical Summits etc.
• Provide lessons learned feedback to Services Sales, Delivery Management and Engineering based on customer feedback
• Creates artefacts and manages collaboration with PS Engineering
• Adhere to VMware PS sales process and methodologies on all opportunity pursuits
• Mastery of necessary tooling including PS Solution Builder
• Maintain proficiency in VMware service offerings, value propositions, and representative case studies
• Support Field enablement of Client Solution Executives (PS Client Sales Execs), CSAs, inside Client Sales Execs and iCSAs based on domain expertise
• Mentoring of peers and more junior CSAs as appropriate
• Lead internal enablement and community discussions around emerging technologies
• Obtain continuous feedback from the field, including customers, bringing IP back to corporate teams and making recommendations on future service offerings
• Working with PS Client Sales Execs help to scrub franchise specific forecasts to provide the best possible view for the business
• Confidently gather use case requirements and solution designs while functioning as an advocate for “Best Practices” and driving adoption of VMware solutions
• Ensure the solution being delivered is fit for purpose, referencing the initial business goals and objectives of the project through strong governance
• Maintain up to date high-level technical knowledge of the VMware product line and future product direction and expert level knowledge of your specialist domains

Requirements:

• You adopt a solutions sales/ consultative selling approach to sell business and IT outcomes, calling on your understanding of the VMware product range and services offerings in an industry context.
• You have a broad range of product knowledge, technical architectural design and hands-on experiences in VMware vSphere, NSX, Cloud management product (e.g. vRA, vCD etc.), DevOps tools, and End User Computing in medium to large environments.
• You are familiar with broadly accepted architectural frameworks (e.g. TOGAF, ITIL etc.), Project Management (e.g. PMP, Prince2), as well as working knowledge for third-parry infrastructure and/or cloud native products and solutions (e.g. Microsoft, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell).
• You are able to generate proposals that are commercially sound, deliverable and compelling, and experiences in producing and reviewing Statements of Work for services.
• You are empathetic, and harness the ‘one VMware team’ spirit to collaborate in a multi-competency environment (sales, presales, generalist, specialists).
• You have developed strong relationships with regional IT decision makers in Government, Enterprise, and/or Commercial accounts, and are able to adapt internal and external communication to a target audience.