Triple CCIE Working in Singapore

Work and life in China
I appreciate that Eman gave me such an opportunity to introduce myself.
I graduated from University in the year of 2002 in China, majoring in Computer Science and Technology. After I graduated, I joined a system integration company in Beijing, one of the biggest Cisco Gold Partners in China.

When I just joined the company, I worked as a network engineer with extremely high enthusiasm and interest in network technology. The company focuses on financial area, and we have two main financial customers, China Construction Bank (CCB) and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC). Both of them have branches in every province of China. So I traveled a lot in China from one province to another. I based in Beijing, but I spent 9 to 10 months in other provinces in a year, delivering network projects for customers. In the first year, my job is pretty easy, configuring routers/switches, coordinating WAN links with Telco service providers, and troubleshooting network problems encountered in the deployment, and I loved my job very much.

In the second year, I was promoted to be an Advanced Network Engineer due to my contribution to the company and big efforts in making technical progress. Since then I started doing some more difficult work, when I found that I need to learn more about network technology, so I decided to take the famous CCIE exam.

CCIE is a systematic job; it demands a lot of hard work. I almost contributed every available minute to CCIE study. I read a large quantity of network technology books, such as Routing TCP/IP, Internet Routing Architectures etc. All these books gave me a much wider and deeper perspective of network and I found the knowledge I acquired from these books was extremely useful and helped me a lot in my job. Every customer I served was satisfied with my work, and I was promoted to be a Project Manager in the third year due to the high level of customer satisfaction. In that time, I always led the delivery team traveling all over China to deploy network projects for the customers.

After I passed CCIE Routing and Switching and got my first CCIE title, I was promoted again to be the technology manager, in charge of the project managers as well as the team. This new role demanded me to learn more in technology so that I can provide consultative advice to the customers. Both the business requirements and my interest in technology drove me to take the second and third CCIE (Security and Service Provider).

Work and life in Singapore
In last August, one of my friends referred me to IBM Singapore. This is a big change for me, but after a careful consideration, I decided to take this opportunity to acquire global experience. So I took the interview and joined IBM Singapore, then I moved from China to Singapore with my family last year and started a different life style.

I joined IBM as a presales network consultant, and this role is quite different from the post-sales roles I played in my last company. I spent more time in technology and with my team when I was in China, but here in Singapore I need to spend more time to communicate with customers, gather their requirements and propose solutions to them. My typical day to day work is, meet or call the customer to gather their technical needs and requirements; work out the network solution as well as the scope of work based on customers’ requirements, and present the solutions to customers. After we win the deal, I need to brief the delivery team with my solution, and help them to deploy the project successfully. I’ll visit the customer after the successful deployment and get feedback from them.

Sometimes, I also perform POC (proof of concept) to customer to validate the solution, especially for the new solutions such as Cisco WAAS (Wide Area Application Services).

Singapore is a hot city. There is only one season here, summer. This is very different from Beijing, China; the four seasons are very clear-cut in Beijing. But living in Singapore is very convenient, because the city is not too big, and the public transportation, shopping centers/supermarkets, schools and hospitals are all very easy to access. I have bought a house in Singapore and settled down with my family. I love Singapore. I hope I can develop a successful career and make a happy life with my family here.