Presenting the people behind the solutions! For the next several days, we’ll be giving you profiles of the Meraki Community All-Stars in their own words.
Today, we hear from All-Stars @BrechtSchamp and @BlakeRichardson :
I live in Ghent, a beautiful city in Belgium, I love it. Back in the day I studied engineering here, with a specialization in IT. That consisted of mainly three parts: general engineering subjects, software development related subjects and system/network engineering subjects. After graduating I decided to go into networking & security. I worked for a vendor of industrial (IT) equipment for a number of years. My job was had a very broad scope, engineering, presales, support, etc. I loved it and I learned a lot. But my hunger for the cutting edge of IT pushed me away from OT and into IT. That is when I took a job at Dimension Data Belgium as a Solutions Specialist Network Integration.
My title has since changed to Solutions Architect Network Integration and our company is actually being rebranded to NTT this year. My job is to translate our customers’ needs into designs/architectures, bills of materials and professional services scopes. I was introduced to Meraki quite early on, and I instantly clicked with it. Ever since I’ve been evangelizing Meraki at our company. What I do on the community helps me to keep up with the latest and greatest of Meraki and I learn a lot. That said, what I post on the community are my personal opinions and recommendations, not necessarily what our engineers would do. I am in presales after all…
I’m a geek, and I’m often reminded of this fact by my girlfriend, luckily she puts up with it. I have a passion for all things IT and I love playing around with home automation, scripting, Raspberry Pi’s. I also love movies (I still need to work on my New Year’s resolution to see the Matrix trilogy again!), series and games. I like to go out for drinks with friends and colleagues, and I suffer from FOMO. I also own a motorcycle and like to work on that. If I do sports it’s usually going out for a run, but I often fail to make time for it. We also like to travel, and in the last years we’ve gone scuba diving on each trip. We love that.
My name is Blake, I live in the land of the long white cloud (New Zealand). I have been working in IT for almost 20 years and a Meraki customer for almost 5 years. I am an IT manager in the education sector managing a network of roughly 2000 client devices (I got that figure from my dashboard). In my spare time I like to spend time away from technology so I fish / hunt and spend as much time as possible in the outdoors.
Stayed tuned for tomorrow’s All-Star profiles!
