Get to know Marek
Name: Marek Soudný
Position: Senior Systems Enigneer
Worked at Orange Business since: July 2023
Based: Vienna, Austria
Can you tell us about how you first came in contact with Orange Business?
I had heard of Orange previously but then in the context of telecommunication. I previously used to work for Hutchison Drei who acquired Orange Austria about 10 years ago, so I had also heard about Orange in that context as well. After having worked for my previous employer for about 10 years I felt as it was time for some change and a new challenge. So, when I started to look around for something new, I came across Orange Business and the position I have today as Senior Systems Engineer which I found interesting and applied for.
How has your experience of joining Orange Business been so far?
So far so good! As I come from an Infrastructure background where I have worked with internal infrastructure, my “customers” have previously been internal clients. So, the main change for me since joining Orange Business has been that I now have external customers instead which puts me in new situations and other challenges. Other than that, I work with a lot of similar tasks and technologies which I am used to do.
You are part of the Operation Center team of Berlin & Vienna, how would you describe what this department is responsible for?
We are responsible for delivering infrastructure to customers, depending on the customer that can be the infrastructure itself, support, and maintenance of their virtual machines, on public clouds which are either dedicated or shared etc. We are right now, for example, preparing to migrate all of them to the new Sovereign Cloud. We manage the hypervisors on VMware, help customers with their virtual machines, sometimes even with their applications on top of them, but exactly what service we deliver depends solely on the customers. So, as a department we work with several different customers and projects.
If we deep dive into your position as a Senior Systems Engineer, what is it you work with more specifically?
I recently got the role as Technical Account Manager for one of our customers where we support in upgrading the VMware for them as they have got a dedicated VMware environment. I have also been supporting other customers as well in the migration to the new dedicated VMware clusters. We of course support each other within the team whenever someone needs support on things where they might want help.
The private cloud you work with is currently going through a big change from a virtualization perspective, can you tell us a bit more about that?
So, we are about to adapt a new Sovereign Cloud model in Vienna & Berlin as well which we sort of already have parts of but we will adapt to a new support model and slightly change how we work in terms of this. We will have our Service Desk with First level support, the Second line which is us and this will affect slightly how we communicate with and work in different teams when it comes to communication with the customers. It is a journey which will be interesting to be part of and to see the results of!
What is it that you enjoy the most with your position and the technologies you work with?
I am happy to still work with VMware as I like that and Virtualization technology in general. Over the years I have worked with a lot of virtualization technologies which are not really used anymore. In addition to that I enjoy that my work and the tasks I have are not monotone. Due to us delivering customised services based on customer needs and wants I get variation in my work, how we work as a team, and what we deliver as we adjust to each customer.
What education and background do you have to be able to do this job?
I only finished secondary school for Electrical Engineering and never finished any of the university courses I started to attend. So, I believe that it is through work, the different positions I have had and the experiences that has got me to where I am today. Initially I focused on Unix only and virtualization mainly. I am quite skilled with FreeBSD and Solaris (which is actually “dead” now). I have worked with lots of different technologies and projects over the years including virtualization, emulation and containerization as well.
What do you personally think is the best thing about working at Orange Business in Vienna?
Focusing on our division of Orange Business, there are not that many of us that are located in Vienna, so the rest of my team are all working from Germany. Fortunately, I had the chance to meet them quickly once I started for our late summer party which was a great opportunity to meet most people that I work closely with. What I enjoy a lot is the attitude that we have in our group where all are very supportive and helpful which makes the remote collaboration work smoothly. Although grabbing a simple coffee together at the office is limited to our great Viennese colleagues, we have a good culture for collaboration in the whole team.
