What do Virtualization and the California Gold Rush of the 1850’s have in common? 
Yea, that’s right. In those days there were gold-seekers, the “49’ers” who were all seeking out a few pretty little gems, heck! Even some ugly gems would be worth it, right? Dirty gold is STILL gold! Now, let’s fast forward 160 years to today’s Present. (Okay, enough of the analogies that GOLD IS WORTH A LOT! You’re right! IT is! ;)) Today, the Gold-seekers.. Those 49’ers (A lot of which happen to reside WITHIN California) are the businesses! The Cloud Providers, the mega-corporations, the EMC’s, Cisco’s and VMware’s of the world, all vying for the GOLD of Virtualization! Human capital! - You guys are the gold, and virtualization is the rocket which will enable you to soar!
Where is the proof in this though you might ask?! (Yea, I know I’m gonna give you some proof alright!)
Disclaimer: The following list is from a ‘point in time’ and is not reflective of ALL of the opportunities which exist. I contacted numerous companies heavily invested in Virtualization, Cloud and other, and some of those companies requested I do not share their data (So don’t get critical if you think I’m intentionally not mentioning a company) This is for YOUR benefit, which I hope every one of you Virtualization kings take advantage of this! (Even the serfs, paupers, princesses and queens of Virtualization too! – /end disclaimer! :))
EMC
Yes, I do work here, but hey, we have some of the best guys in the world! And with that note, we’re still looking to find, recruit and hire the best! No one leads this champion cause any better than Chad Sakac! Who has gone to the extents to actually publish this More than 200 open positions at EMC, EMC partners and VCE and the recent UPDATE for this! But let me quote the following from that blog post at its time: (Wow, over 100 positions mentioned!)
The EMC vSpecialist team is hiring 97 people. The right people for this role love technology. It is ideal if you are technical customer-facing type or a freakishly technical sales type, and want to work at a great Fortune 500 company that is at the center of the virtualization and cloud wave (that being EMC). The team has a crazy work ethic – you’ll work your buns off, but will be part of something fun. You will play with EMC, VMware and Cisco technologies, and be exposed right on the bleeding edge wave of a lot of stuff.
The EMC Consulting org is hiring 14 people. The right people for this role have a world view where you think that it’s less about technology and products, and more about services, people, and transformative projects (oh, and you love technology too). There are Cloud roles, Virtual Datacenter roles, and Risk and Security roles.
The EMC SI/Al team is hiring 9 people. These are people who are blends of the vSpecialist Sales/Technical type (roll them into one :-), and are focused on EMC partners like Deloitte, Accenture, Wipro, TCS, HCL.
Obviously, there is a LOT of opportunity over here at EMC (In fact, feel free to get in touch with me if you’re interested in more insight as well – If you wonder what it’s like working here at EMC, refer to my previous posts on the very subject; Joining EMC and transitioning from “Job” to “Career” tips for new hires and expats! – So good luck and let me know how I can help!
#Update to include other opportunities which Chad had just posted! More VMware, Cisco, EMC, and VCE and Partner gigs…
Search for Careers at EMC here! (click apply now :))
Cisco
Whoa! This is Cisco, the networking company! What does this have to do with Virtualization and Cloud?!?! Yea.. baby, that’s right. We are ALL fighting for the same resources, the same gold! Everyone everywhere! :) Cisco has opportunities across the stack with Servers (UCS) Storage networking (MDS and Nexus) Virtualization (Rocking it out with what we said above) and more and beyond! I did not vet EVERY single entry on the Cisco site (Hey, I’m not the one LOOKING for the job! but these options do quite exist ;)) For what it’s worth, a search of “vmware” and a search of “Cloud” as separate search terms returned results in the 150-200 range. Wow! That is a lot of jobs with a single keyword. Maybe there are only 50 or 100 quality jobs let’s say. – Or put another way.. Wow, there are 50-100 quality jobs at the champion of industry Cisco!
Search for Careers at Cisco here!
VMware
You don’t get much closer to Virtualization than this! I did a general search of all open-req’s returning 683 open positions! When I cut it down to “Support, Technical, Technical Marketing” etc kind of limiting the scope to remove the “HR and Legal” type postings, I still ended up with 105 open positions! VMware is a rockstar environment to work at and they have a great culture!
Search for Careers at VMware here!
Acadia
If you missed all of the announcements from last year (and continually growing since) Acadia is a joint venture, founded by Cisco and EMC to further capitalize on the investments of VMware and Intel! The venture was established to help partners and customers accelerate the transition to pervasive virtualization and private cloud. – Okay, enough of stealing that stuff from their site.. Nonetheless, this lets you work with a converged-ness of all of these companies and really get to do some COOL stuff, across numerous roles! (FYI: I know a whole bunch of the recruiters who are now over there… Just saying.. ;)) On a full-purpose search of Acadia I came across 315 open positions (Wow! That’s a damn lot! Lots are home based mobile too?! WTF!? cool! :))
Oh and hijacked from Chad’s blog;
VCE is hiring 100 field people and 17 solutions people. These people are part of Acadia (the EMC/Cisco Joint Venture). The Acadia mandate is both expanding, but also becoming more focused under Michael Capellas. VCE has done much well, but people are recognizing certain things (single SKU, single order, ship as a unit) need to happen faster.
The field folks would support the vSpecialists and the Cisco Datacenter field folks, as well as VCE partners. The profile of these field folks (both Sales and Technical) are the same core profile as vSpecialists. In fact, they are planning to call the Technical roles “vArchitects” a nice homage to some of the success we’ve had :-)
The solutions folks would be more happy in the lab than out in the field, but still customer focused. They will be churning out more solutions on Vblocks, but then a subset of them would be taking the results out into the market via the vArchitects and vSpecialists.
Search for Careers at Acadia here! (click browse open positions)
Dell
So, when I first started working on this (over a month ago) I reached out to various other champions of industry – My good friends at Dell said the following (at the time) – One guy said there were over 80 positions across the country, but then said check with this other guy! He reported back with “There are 342 Virtualization related positions (sales, marketing, eng and services) worldwide. Whoa! That’s pretty damn cool! Obviously your mileage and time may vary.. those numbers may have increased or decreased, but the fact of the matter is.. that’s a damn lot of VIRT specific jobs available in the business (translates into WIN) So, lest you think your options are limited, they may appear limitless across the stack and businesses!
Search for Careers at Dell Here! (They are great for locality of reference!)
HP
Hey now! You’re taking this competitive appreciation a little too far! Err.. Wait, no I’m not! But I am trying to give you an accurate picture… and hey, we’re all friends (except during the close giggle ;)) But yea, I got the hookup from my friends over at HP as well! And what did they say (at the time, again.. could have gone up or down!) “238 Virtualization positions came up”
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Another massive stack of Virt roles?! Yea that’s right baby, all across the stack! Looks like every vendor has a need which needs filling, oh my!
Search for Careers at HP Here! (Interesting search site.. good luck :))
CDW
I’m not mentioning these guys just because I drive by their corporate headquarters all the time. No.. They’ve built themselves up from a ‘warehouse’ store of sorts to a fully packaged interactive delivery machine (with open jobs ;)) They only have a handful [relative to the other companies] with req’s around Virtualization, but the opportunities are there!
Search for Careers at CDW here!
Veeam
I want you to know that these guys do not get a mention because they throw amazing parties at events and I practically know (and have known) nearly the entire company since they started. No… These guys NEED Virtualization guys, and they are some of the bread and the butter which helps drive this whole Virtualization world! (Cmon, Get your gold here!)
I cannot say just how many open req’s there are – but talk about opportunities across the entire stack! Sales! Support! Marketing! Technical! There’s no going wrong, and win win win!
Search for Careers at Veeam here! (And I can always introduce you to the right folks there as well!)
Citrix
Hey now! I thought this post was all about VMware! Next thing you know you’re gonna talk about Hyper-V?!? (No.. I’m not… Microsoft’s site is VERY challenging to search through, so they won’t be included, that and they have a trillion jobs so it’s hard to break it down to SPECIFIC to Virtualization ;)) But might I add on a separate note, weekly I get mails from recruiters asking me if I have any candidates (for vendor or for customer side) with Citrix knowledge/expertise/etc. I imagine a lot of those guys have been…. moving around, causing some rifts of sorts! So the opportunities are ripe if you love the Citrix stack! (Hey, I’m Metaframe and Winframe certified… and current today too.. so I’m no stranger to Citrix ;))
Search for Careers at Citrix here!
Thin Clients (Wyse, 10zig, Pano Logic, nComputing)
Okay, I’m not going to lie to you. There aren’t really any Virtualization positions at these top Thin Client type companies (But when you think of Virtualization and VDI… you think of thin clients right? …. You better?;)) But they do have a handful of careers among the group of them (numerous high level jobs too!) So, don’t disregard the opportunity they provide, just note; they’re not looking for virtualization as much as others, FYI :) – For ease.. the hot-links in the Thin Clients heading will take you to their respective career pages!
HyTrust
Okay… I talked to and interviewed these folks at VMworld 2010 (Well, Roger Lund did I think I recorded it, either way!) these guys are a virtualization startup, they are hiring light [as any startup should] but definitely should be someone to watch! And if you’re looking to join a start-up to take the world by storm… Yea, check it out :)
Search for Careers at HyTrust here!
Rackspace
Whoa, why are these guys on this list?!? Hey, I wanted to high-light them… they definitely fall more into the Cloud Stack which has a strong effect on Virtualization and (blah blah blah, won’t he shut up about Cloud?) Seriously though! You bettah recognize! I hear about Rackspace all of the time from all over, so may as well invest in your career there if you see it fit :) [It doesn’t hurt that someone I care about tells me how cool they are too, so why not make sure you know too ;)]
Search for Careers at Rackspace here!
Apigee
In the spirit of gold rushes, Apigee the API’s of the Internets is also dealing with it’s own API Gold Rush, so I thought it relevant to include :) This is something I’ll likely be talking about more in the future and the importance of open API’s as we transcend and interoperate within Clouds and Virtualization – so may as well get the insight first and foremost!
Search for Careers at Apigee here!
So my peers, colleagues, friends and beyond, where does this leave us? (Other than at 5am still up from medicine to correct my lung infection I have grin)
I’m sure you’ll easily go on record saying “Whoa, this is only a few thousand jobs around a very specific [or even broad] technology!” Yea, that’s exactly what I’m saying. I chose a HANDFUL of companies who allowed me access to their insight of their own business needs to reflect on the industry respectively. I am saying those of you who invested in virtualization years ago? It is RIPE to move up and beyond! And for those of you who only recently started dabbling in virtualization or even still to adopt it and check it out? The SAME opportunities exist!
I figure, there are around 15,000 REALLY good virtualization jobs out there for skill sets at the lowest (and ALWAYS at the highest levels). However, the sad part is, there aren’t that many skilled candidates out there to pursue these opportunities that do exist, [with or without the drive and passion we all want].
We are at an EPIC point here in the industry. Never before have there been so many necessary roles to fill by these gold-seekers. Seeking you. My good friends, Virtualization, Cloud, API’s, even SERVERS are Gold! Don’t wait until it is too late and “Everyone is doing it”. Do it now. Invest in YOU today. Believe me, you’ll be the winner. Do not hesitate to contact me directly for additional anecdotal evidence around jobs like these across all companies, expectations, thoughts, perspective and why you should pursue something like this. I’ve been doing x86 virtualization since the beta-dawn of VMware, and so many other things in those days and since. Please don’t wait until 10 years from today to invest in your future.
If you feel a specific company was not represented adequately or you would like to be represented in this list – Do not hesitate to get in touch, and I’ll do whatever I have in my power to introduce the community to your virtual careers :) Good luck, and Good future my friends.