Unlocking the Cloud Operating Model

Our Cloud Advisor Petri Pekkarinen works at the Helsinki office and his main responsibilities are to consult customers about public cloud strategy, operational models and governance. You might know him from our blog as he has earlier written about how Right Partners Are the Key to Digital Transformation Success. Here's his story. 1. Where are you from and how did you end up at Nordcloud? I’m from Helsinki, Finland. I started my career roughly 15 years ago in telecommunications industry and then moved on to traditional datacenter marketing and solution sales. Roughly 3 years ago I realized my whole career has been very product driven and products alone don’t make a change - people do.  So I made a move service provider company and consulting, but even there I felt I was not able to make a big enough impact.  At Nordcloud I have reached my goal and here I’m really able to help organizations transform and modernize their operations. 2. What is your core competence? I’m always looking forward and always trying to find ways to improve in everything. I believe my background in business, product management and IT contributes strongly on my ability to see the big picture and areas where Nordcloud’s customers should improve. 3. What sets you on fire / what’s your favourite thing technically with public cloud? It is definitely the global scale. Public cloud puts everyone on the same line, no matter what is the size of your company. Public cloud significantly reduces time-to-market for new products and effortlessly makes them available for everyone around the world. Thanks to public cloud, competitive landscape is dramatically different to, say 10 years ago, and traditional companies are forced to rethink the way they are operating in order to remain competitive against more agile competitors.  4. What do you like most about working at Nordcloud? At Nordcloud I have an opportunity to cowork and learn from very skilled teams and individuals and deliver world class services.   5. What is the most useful thing you have learned at Nordcloud? Well, to start with, I didn’t have public cloud experience, so I pretty much started from scratch. But it was a positive surprise to realize physical datacenter infrastructure and infrastructure in cloud are not very different in terms of architecture and components, so it didn’t take long to get up to speed. The real learning for me is around devops, agile development methods and technologies.  I’m still learning and most likely learning will never stop. That's another great part of working at Nordcloud!   6. What do you do outside work? My family keeps me pretty busy (in a positive way), but when I have personal free time I enjoy going to live concerts and movies. I’m also passionate Liverpool FC supporter and in general I’m watching the Premier League football almost every weekend. I also like to read informative and educational books.  7. How would you describe Nordcloud’s culture in 3 words? This one is easy to question to answer. Open, collaborative, agile.  8. Best Nordcloudian memory? AWS Summit 2019 in Stockholm. It was really great to hear Guido Partels (Managing Director, Nordics & Baltics) thank Nordcloud for outstanding cooperation during his opening keynote.