Yesterday was my last day at NDS8. I can’t believe it’s been a little over two years since I decided to have a go at life on the road in consulting. It’s been a fun and tiring time, and I’ve learned so much. Not just about technologies, but about project management, business process, other people and mostly myself. I’ve managed to get customers out of some of the strangest of scrapes. I’ve worked late and travelled during my own time at weekends, just so I can turn up bright eyed and bushy tailed at 0900 on Monday morning so that the customer is left with a positive impression.

So why the move? Well it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a couple of months and an unbelievable opportunity came up that I simply could not turn down. From Thursday, I will be employed by Xtravirt Consulting, who are VMware’s EMEA Consulting Partner of the Year 2011. As I remarked to them at my interview and without being sycophantic, this to me is the Champions League of virtualisation jobs. It will take me in a direction far beyond where I am now, making me a far better consultant and giving me some real cutting edge technical skills.

It’s no great secret that the Novell space is shrinking and I’ve been really into virtualisation for years, cloud in the last 6/9 months. I’ve had the privilege of attending VMworld EMEA, and just seeing what a vibrant community of partners, vendors and customers has sprung up around VMware just made me want to be a part of it. It’s where all the innovation is happening right now, and the pace of change is electric. It also means I’ll get a lot more involved in things like storage design, which up until now, had only been at a high level.

In this business, if you fail to evolve you soon get left behind and I’m determined that won’t happen to me. I’m excited, nervous and slightly intimidated about my new role, but that’s how it should be as it will put me on my toes and keep me there!