Personal Innovation Awards: Technical Excellence - Rodney Haywood, Alphawest

To Alphawest principal architect for datacentre and cloud computing, Rodney Haywood, winning the personal innovation award for technical excellence is a reward for his team and recognition for a job well done.

“I got the personal innovation award because of the groundbreaking work the team I lead has been doing in cloud computing,” he said. “It’s good to have some recognition for hard work, but I think it’s also good for the team because no man is an island.

“They need to see they can get recognition for what they’re doing.”

Haywood’s company is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Optus and the two companies recently released an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud product targeting mid- to large enterprises as well as Government agencies.

“We’re using a lot of groundbreaking technologies that have never been used before in this combination,” he said. “We’re using the first customer shipment of Cisco’s Unified Computing System as a platform in the world and we’re tying that together with EMC’s storage technology – one of the first VMAX units into the region.

“We’re also one of the first in the world to deploy VMware’s vCloud Director, which was only released to general availability a couple of weeks ago.”

While some solution architects are happy to ride the wave of innovation post-release, Haywood and his team were working on the products before they even made it to the Beta stage of release. “We’ve really been influencing the market and working with the leaders globally,” Haywood said.

As other cloud providers shift jobs and infrastructure overseas, Haywood is planting Alphawest’s roots firmly in Australia as part of a strategy to win Government and major enterprise contracts. Using a local datacentre will suit companies that demand their infrastructure and data be kept within Australia’s borders.

“What we need is a better variety of services available in Australia,” he said. “It’s great to see more being released in-country…This will promote competition and give the local market the convenience and assurance it’s been looking for.”

But, more importantly, Haywood said the ARN awards were a way of recognising talented professionals in IT community and making them feel appreciated.

“We need to foster our people because a lot of them move overseas,” he said. “It’s good to keep a lot of our intellectual property and talent in-country and it helps people aspire to great things.”

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