Seeking my next FinOps career adventure!!!

Josh Varney

**  I am actively looking for my next FinOps adventure.  I'm open to both FinOps leadership positions and individual contributor roles. **

In the summer of 2016, I quite literally fell into AWS cost management.   No one was doing it at the time and I began poking around.   It didn't take much time for me to realize I found my niche. 

I'm not a programmer, I can't code.  I didn't go to formal school to code and to this day I still have nightmares of coding with QBasic in high school (Yes that was a long time ago, don't remind me).  I can read the code, I can follow the functions, process and logical steps but writing it no dice.

Working with AWS (cloud cost in general) cost management I get to do all the fun things I love.  I get to work with some amazing tech, I get to apply my business/finance knowledge and lastly I get to use that small extrovert streak in me by getting to work/interact with a lot of different people. 

Outside of work I enjoy a good hike (I like being outdoors in general), I love pizza (thin crust, grew up in upstate NY, enjoy flying drones and I'm a professional amateur woodworker.

My vision is to build an elite cost and vendor organization that will help deliver the best return for our cloud infrastructure spend and vendors that provide those services.   By providing the best training, tools, systems and processes for our people in these positions.

Primary Responsibilities (but not limited to):
Building FinOps into the Splunk Culture
Managing Infrastructure Cloud Spend
     - Implement a cloud spend tool to help everyone be able to access timely information. 
     - Savings Plans (ISP/CSP), Reserved Instances (RI's) etc for peak discount efficiency
     - Identifying and Helping Splunk engineering teams reduce seven figures on monthly cloud spend
     - Helping build a culture within Splunk around a core FinOps principle "Everyone takes ownership for their cloud spend"
     - Helping team collaborate, to allow them to get the right information, at the right time, so they are making decisions to drive real business value
     - Providing real time reports to engineering managers for the resources they are consuming in the cloud
     - Allocating costs to the correct departments for finance and account numbers
     - Building of KPI's and metrics to gauge a baseline on cloud cost

Vendor Management
     - Building process and systems around our different vendors at Splunk 
     - Building standardized processes for performance metrics on

Manager, Cloud Cost

As part of the Product Operations team, I’m responsible for our Network Operations Center (NOC).  Where we monitor day and night, all our data and telephony traffic for our customers.   We build out our processes, systems and training to ensure the highest levels of availability for our product.

I’m also responsible for visibility and reporting in our Technology department.

My mission is to provide our customers with the best system uptime available that is the key to their success and ours.

In this role I completed some heavy AWS cost analysis including: determining where wasteful spend was occurring, increasing our efficiency, getting the right Saving Plan and RI's in place and consolidating underutilized AWS resources.   I was in CloudHealth all the time looking over AWS costs and seeing where improvements could be made.

Summary of Work Experience:
-Relentless work ethic, responsible, reliable, simple and direct with my communication structure
-Strong willingness to learn, improve my skillset
-Extensive communications skills both written and verbal with strong presentation skills
-Very process and analytical driven, things in general operate better the more organized they are
-Ability to listen, understand, lead and direct team environments
-High emotional intelligence, applying critical thinking to difficult situations
-Experience with high growth, fast moving SaaS based companies
-Sourcing, scheduling, interviewing, hiring, extending offers to candidates within 2 weeks.
-AWS Practitioner Certification ID# 5VDC6PEKPER11FSR holder & studying associate for Solution Architect & Sys Ops
-5 Years AWS exposure/experience and 4 years of CloudHealth exposure/experience
-Use monitoring tools to help troubleshoot issues when problems arise
-Skills: AWS, Azure, FinOps, I'm a CloudHealth nerd, DOMO, Opsgenie, SignalFX, Jira, Coupa, Confluence, Office, Salesforce
-Extensive CloudHealth analysis with cloud spend and write up reports to improve efficiencies

Director, Product Operations

Building out processes, systems and training to combine all of our customer support needs into a centralized support structure.

Our main products include:
LMP (Lead Management Platform by InsideSales.com)
PDSF (PowerDialer for Salesforce)
Microsoft Dynamics PowerDialer
Vision
iHance (also known as Absolute Automation)
HD Forecast (formerly known as C9)
Persogenics
Sales Indicator

While working on this centralized support structure we are building out our international support processes, systems and training for our customers in Europe, with our headquarters stationed in London.

I am responsible for everything that happens in this department. 

My mission is to provide the best support possible to our customers through training, coaching, mentoring, product knowledge, removing road blocks for our Product Specialist teams.  Empower anyone with the ability to Act.

Director, Support Engineers

The areas of stewardship I am responsible for include the following groups:

Tier I Product Specialists
Tier II Product Specialists
Enterprise Product Specialists
Tier III Product Specialists
Sys Admins - Building out for the future
Coaches 
Leadership team for each of these groups.

I am responsible for everything that happens in this department.

My mission is to provide the best support possible to our customers through training, coaching, mentoring, product knowledge, removing road blocks for our Product Specialist teams.  Empower anyone with the ability to Act.

Senior Manager of Product Specialists

Product Specialist Manager:
Managing the tech support team to deliver the best possible support to our customers through different types of media (phone, internal trouble ticket system, email and community site).

Built our team from 2 people to what it is now. I help our teams trouble shoot problems from the simple fix to the elaborate detailed puzzle that makes you scratch your head for a bit.

Effectively communicate concerns, goals and strategy to other departments within InsideSales.com.

InsideSales.com System Administer Trained

Currently I'm studying for the Salesforce.com Admin Certification and I frequently work with Salesforce.com System Administrators .

I've trained people in my department that have moved to other departments in the company, which include Implementation Consultant, Account Management, Sales Engineer, Development, QA and Product Design. 

The main priority at InsideSales.com is to contact your leads as fast as possible.  Here you have the tools to do so.  Contact times are measured in minutes, not hours or days like other companies.

Our research studies show that the faster you contact a lead, the better contact and qualifying ratios you will have.

Product Specialist Manager

Managing a specific set of customers to ensure Customer Success
Meeting with customer directly face to face to discuss successes and challenges

Account Manager

Managing the tech support team to deliver the best possible support to our customers through different types of media (internal trouble ticket system, email, phone and community site)

Tech Support Manager

Worked as a Part-Time Technical Support Rep, taking customer inquries for support questions through phone, email and customer support portals.

Worked part-time while finishing my final year of college.

Part Time Technical Support

I renewed investment research subscription based products to a warm customer list.  I received a broad education around the stock market which included stock, options, advanced options and currencies.

I maintained a weekly sales quota of $30,000 dollars for 2 years until I moved to the Prophet.net team.  My quota was reduced because I was working 30 hours a week and going to school full time as well.  I left INVESTools for my last year of college, so I could focus on my core business and finance classes.

Renewal Agent

I worked as a direct sales rep, selling Dish Network Satellite system in Utah and Fresno, California.

Sales Rep

Sold Electronics to Home and Business based customers...

Computers, printers, scanners, networking equipment etc..

Electronic Sales Associate

Sold computer and computer equipment for Gateway Country in the OfficeMax store in Vestal, NY.