Eric Burns Online — Page 10 of 14 — My Virtual Take on Tech

Being Prepared for Changes in Your Career

Right now is a great time to be employed in the IT space. But it doesn’t mean that your current employment has any guarantees, especially if you work for a small start-up, or if your employer has been taken private. There are a few steps that are worthwhile no matter…

Care and Feeding of a Sales Engineer

December 9, 2019 Attitude Sales Engineers No Comments

Sales Reps and Sales Engineers often come from very different personality types. The rep is responsible for finding the leads, frequently getting told “no” multiple times before finally getting a meeting setup. They handle the relationship building, negotiations and keeping things on track. (Yes, SEs build relationships, but it isn’t…

The Best Conference Demo

November 27, 2019 Sales Engineers 1 Comment

There are three ways that firms create and/or maintain the environment(s) used to provide demos at tech conferences. Each has their tradeoffs, and you must weigh them to find which is right for your company. Each for His/Her Own The most common I’ve seen since 2010 is that each SE…

The Foundational Learnings from a Serial Cable

October 31, 2019 Attitude Startups No Comments

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. Will Durant I find it interesting that people will put more energy into questioning the reason for foundational learning then they put into immersing themselves in the lesson itself. That lack of prioritizing energies lessen the odds that the knowledge…

What Were Your Most Impactful College Courses?

September 26, 2019 Attitude Getting Hired No Comments

I recently saw a headline on LinkedIn where someone was talking about how much of an impact edX had on their work life. This got me reflecting on my college education and a few of the classes that had a huge impact on my life. For most of us, our…

Liars and Statistics . . . or Perhaps Accounting?

August 19, 2019 Startups No Comments

Early on I learned the quote that “Statistics never lie, but liars use statistics!” Over the years I’ve gotten to see some SLAs that sure sounded good but would be impossible to ever breach. There also are plenty of companies that use statistics to make performance sound so much better…

The Blues Brothers and (Relative) Velocity – Have You Heard?

July 9, 2019 High Level Tech Intro Sales Engineers Startups No Comments

June of this year contained O’Reilly’s Velocity Conference 2019 in San Jose. As with anything O’Reilly it was a well done event. I’d like to share details for some of the technologies I learned about, as well as people I met. If you are interested in Web Performance or expanding your technology…

But What Kind of Demo Can YOU Give?

June 28, 2019 Sales Engineers No Comments

Sales Engineers need to give demos for almost all products or solutions that are technical to any level. The problem is that there is no standard to define what constitutes a demo. A naive VP might be satisfied with seeing a single integration as proof that you can do a…

The Blues Brothers and (Relative) Velocity – Have You Not Heard?

June 24, 2019 High Level Tech Intro No Comments

Removed by request.

Is This Why the Startups Are Eating Your Lunch? Part II

May 27, 2019 Startups No Comments

My second introduction to the “start-up” advantage was with Cerent. We started as “Fiberlane”, imploded and became several companies. It was only the second tech company I had worked for, and the stories along the way highlighted why startups are able to take fewer people and less money to build…