Technical Global Advisor

Description:Job Summary:As a Technical Global Advisor you will utilize your strong technical competencies and account management skills to provide the highest level of ?Personalized, Proactive, Preventative and Reactive? Enterprise-Class support services. You will build a partner relationship with the customer to better serve their business needs, as well as to react quickly and revise approach when business needs change. The Technical Global Advisor role is critical to the assigned Account/Sales Team in furthering the NetApp partner relationship, and in helping to increase sales by coordinating support activities for the account. Working very closely and collaboratively with members of the Account Team and customer contacts, you will become intimately acquainted with the customers business requirements, technical needs, systems, environment and service history. Essential Functions:Technical Global Advisors work with Network Appliance customers, and the assigned Account/Sales Team by providing expertise in the following areas: - Identify and address customers critical technical issues (escalations) and non-technical issues, and coordinate necessary support activities. May include troubleshooting and solving escalated customer issues directly with the appropriate engineering teams within NetApp, as well as 3rd party vendors for multi-vendor issues.- Monitor customer open cases during business hours.- Prepare periodic and custom reports.- Environment assessment/documentation, including software and hardware release planning, upgrade planning and bug risk analysis.- Monitor customers systems utilizing autosupports and Support Console to identify potential problems and trends, and subsequently make the necessary recommendations to resolve them to ensure optimal performance of these systems.- Ensure that all recommended Best Practices are adhered to for maximizing product optimization and uptime.- Notify customer of new product features and fixes ? field/product alert analysis and recommendations.- Help educate the customer as needed on the various tools that are on NOW and help them understand their NetApp products better.- Compile and deliver root cause analysis on either product or process breakdowns as required.- Represent NetApp in support meetings with customers on a regular basis.- Manage special projects as assigned by management to meet customer and cross-functional team needs.Education and Experience:- Minimum of 8 years of relevant experience is required. Prior experience as a Technical Support Engineer, Escalations Engineer, Technical Account Manager, and/or a Project Manager is desired. - A Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field is required. - NACP Certification is required. - One or more industry certifications, such as MCSE, CCNA/CCNP/CCIE, OCA/OCP/OCM, Sun Solaris, IMB AIX, Brocade, Veritas, etc., is desired.Qualifications:Requirements:- Excellent written and verbal communication skills. - Good interpersonal communication and customer service skills are needed in order work successfully with customers, and cross functional teams to help to increase sales.- In-depth technical knowledge in three or more of the following areas is essential:- Networking- NFS, CIFS, SAN- UNIX/Linux- Microsoft Windows- RAID- Database (e.g. Oracle, SQL Servers)- Backup and Recovery- Enterprise Applications (e.g. Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, Clearcase)- Block Technology (e.g. iSCSI, FCP)- Netcache- Account management and project management experience.- Strong aptitude for learning new technologies and understanding how to utilize them in a customer facing environment. - Ability to follow standard engineering principles and practices.- Creative approach to problem solving.- Travel to the customers domestic sites and other global sites as necessary.- Carry a pager and a cell phone 24x7 for after hours on-call support for critical issues.Responsibility and Interaction:- Responsibility: - The types of tasks this individual is responsible are a mix of structured and unstructured tasks. This individual will apply attained experiences and knowledge in solving routine to moderately complex problems. - Interaction: - This individual interacts primarily with Staff to Director level employees within the function, and the technical team on assigned projects. There may be communication with employees in other functions as required.- General direction is provided on routine work, and detailed direction is provided on new projects and assignments; as well as on-going review of activities and priorities.- The ideal candidate will be an important contributor or lead on team projects.Salary/Benefits: > $100,000To learn more about NetApp employee benefits go to: http://www.netapp.com/jobs/benefits.htmlJob Location: Sunnyvale, CAJob Number: RUSANAP2129-594716Company URL: http://www.netapp.comCompany Profile:NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that help accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost efficiency. Our dedication to principles of simplicity, innovation, and customer success has made us one of the fastest-growing storage and data management providers today.Customers around the world choose us for our "go beyond" approach and broad portfolio of solutions for business applications, storage for virtual servers, disk-to-disk backup, and more. Our solutions provide nonstop availability of critical business data and simplify business processes so you can deploy new capabilities with confidence and get to revenue faster than ever before. You can rely on our industry-leading solutions to lower the cost of protecting your data, business, and reputation.We bring together the industry's best partners and technology to deliver services that help you maximize what you are getting from your infrastructure. Our collaborative approach, working as one team with one goal, means that you get a solution that is just right for you-on time and on budget. To support your global business, we provide highly-responsive support in local languages. From London to Austin, from Bangalore to Tokyo, well work with you to solve your problems and help you reach your goals.Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com