Q&A With Andrew Madrid

iXsystems shows you a glimpse of the work life of our Product Manager, Andrew, with a few questions and answers. Guess who does the answering!
1.) What’s the most fun aspect of being a Product Manager?
The part of being Product Manager that I enjoy the most is developing new products for the company.
I work with our key technology partners to improve existing products and to introduce new technologies that will enhance iXsystems’ overall vision of supplying our customers with Enterprise Servers for Open Source.
2.) What’s the most exciting technology coming out in your field?
I see the interface transitions from today’s 3Gb/s standard to 6Gb/s becoming the SAS interface norm. This is a transition that I see happening in the storage space, as well (controllers, backplanes and hard drives).
Cores, cores, cores!!! First, there were single core CPUs. Then came dual, quad, eight, and now TWELVE core CPU’s! Our AX1403 server has a 1U chassis and four of the twelve core processors. That adds up to 48 cores of processing power in just one server!
3.) How do you decide what new types of builds to put together?
I work with our engineering counterparts to define our product release requirements. I work alongside our marketing department to define the go-to-market strategy and help them understand the product positioning, key benefits, and target customer. I also serve as the internal and external evangelist for iXsystems’ product offering, working with the sales channel and key partners.
4.) What’s the most rewarding thing you’ve done for work, recently?
Recently, the iXsystems website was completely revamped and updated. Along with an entirely new look and feel, our product line was completely overhauled. We now have a much more informative site that allows us to better communicate to our customers the line of servers we offer and the technologies that power those servers. I worked with our web team to determine what information the site portrays, and also provided content to convey to our customers what iXsystems has to offer.
5.) If you were trying to convince somebody that working at iXsystems is awesome, what’s the first thing you would tell them about your job?
I love our employees’ passion and commitment to providing our customers with the best possible server purchasing experience. This experience starts with our front line communicators, the sales team. Our sales team is dedicated to asking the right questions that will help diagnose the problem you are trying to solve and determine the best solution to that problem. They then put together a strategy to determine what technologies and systems suit you best.
Once the customer has decided on making a purchase, our production team takes over. They carefully review the order, and begin the build. Each person on our production floor takes great pride in what they do. When you walk out onto our production floor, you see people actually smiling and working with one another to build, configure and test machines. Once the systems are built, installed, burned-in, and tested, our quality control department takes over. Each one of our systems goes through a tedious checklist to ensure that it has been built to both the customer’s specifications and to our rigorous standards.  Once systems have passed the quality control department, they move to our inventory shipping team. The inventory shipping team is responsible for making sure that systems get packaged up and prepared for delivery to the customer. Each person in this process takes pride in their responsibility to build the best possible system.
If there are ever any issues with one of our systems, iXsystems shows off what truly sets us apart from the competition. Our support engineers are experts in open source and at finding and solving hardware and software related issues. When you speak with one of our support team members, you can hear their sincerity and commitment to restoring your system to its full potential.
I guess I did not necessarily talk about the benefits of my job here, but rather why I love working at iXsystems. I take great pride in what I do, and so does iXsystems as a whole. Of course, there are a lot of great perks, like the awesome lounge, a gym, free lunch on Fridays, company events like the annual picnic and Christmas party, a relaxed atmosphere, and dedication and support to Open Source.  But I wanted to tell you why you should purchase your servers at iXsystems, and why we are the best. 🙂