Name: Marek Soudný
Position: Senior System Engineer
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 System 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 to which I am used to.

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 services to customers. Depending on the customer that can be the infrastructure itself, support, and maintenance of their virtual machines on our sovereign cloud that is either dedicated or shared. Right now, for example, we are preparing to migrate our existing customers from our current Private Cloud to the new Sovereign Cloud. We manage the hypervisors on VMware, help customers with their virtual machines and customer portal, and for some customers we also manage some of their specific applications on top. Customers can choose the service to be delivered from our existing portfolio. So, as a department we work with several different customers and services.

If we deep dive into your position as a Senior System Engineer, what is it you work with more specifically?
I work with VMware and KVM virtualization technologies, support RedHat and Debian based linux distributions and we work with other tools, like puppet, ansible and jenkins, in order to automate our daily tasks. We also maintain firewalls and loadbalancers for our customers as well as network switches. We provide our customers support with their applications, be it webservers (apache, nginx), databases (postgresql, mysql, mongodb) or others (kafka, ELK, and others), or we directly manage them providing them as a service.

I recently got the role as Technical Account Manager for one of our customers where we supported the upgrade of their VMware clusters as they have got a dedicated VMware environment. Being part of the support team, where we support each other as well as our customers, I have for example also been supporting the ongoing customer migration to the new dedicated VMware clusters.

The Sovereign Cloud you work with is currently going through a big change from a virtualization perspective, can you tell us a bit more about that?
We are about to adapt a new Sovereign Cloud in Vienna & Berlin which means we are moving away from KVM towards 100% VMware. Such a change brings many challenges, beginning with moving virtual servers from one platform to the new one, adapting our current processes and pipelines to the newer technology and in parallel we are also changing our support model to better serve our customers. It is a journey which will be interesting to be part of and to see the results in the end! On the other hand we will be able to serve our customers with VMware backed Kubernetes platform – tanzu – which is a huge benefit in my eyes.

What is it that you enjoy the most with your position?
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 diversified. 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. I believe that it is through work, the different positions I have had and the experiences that 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 located in Vienna, so the rest of my team is working from Germany. Fortunately, I had the chance to meet them quickly once I started at our late summer party which was a great opportunity to meet most people that I work closely with. Although grabbing a simple coffee with someone at the office is limited to my great Viennese colleagues, we have a good culture for collaboration in the whole team. They are all very supportive which makes the remote collaboration work smoothly. I like the attitude we have in our group!