Pieter-Jan Switten

As the lead for non-technical enablement within the Solution Engineering team in EMEA, I drive training initiatives and collaborate across functions to boost SE productivity. Adept in coaching, content development, and relationship management, I advocate for global Sales Engineering needs. My analytical approach informs impactful enablement strategies, ensuring our Sales Engineering practitioners excel in the field.

When becoming manager of my peers, it happened quite naturally. I have been a mentor for a lot of colleagues for many years and I felt recognized being a ‘leader’. I took several EMEA wide initiatives like a trusted advisor program, developed a knowledge clip video platform and took several actions to bring more structure in the processes, data sources and reporting. For these initiatives I won the Spirits of EMEA Award, and at the Technical KickOff 2023 I won the Award of Most Innovative leader.

As a part of the Splunk Pre-Sales team in Belux with a focus on AI-Ops and Observability, I support the Sales not only on a technical win, but it is my goal to become a trusted advisor for my customers and prospects. At existing customers, it is important to drive adoption in getting the most value out of any machine data collected in the Splunk Data-To Everything platform. This can be done by running technical and inspirational workshops and webinars. I interact closely with all stakeholders at the customer and internally at Splunk, making sure to connect the dots providing the right answers to the right people being technical, business oriented or value driven. Besides to regular pre-sales activities, I am involved in the Observability and IT/AIOps community, actively developing and sharing content. At different internal and external events (live and on-line), I presented the value of Splunk for our customers and partners At the Sales Kickoff in February 2019, I was awarded as the ‘Best Fast Starter of EMEA North’.

Tein Telecom was at that time looking for new markets in the command and control domain. As a Product Manager Voice Solutions I was responsible for business development. During the first stage of this function I analysed the market by meeting 35+ vendors, prospects, existing customers and integrators.

As an expert in networking technologies, it is my job to manage the product line from a strategic point of view: *Specifying market requirements for current (Cisco, Enterasys) and future products by collecting market information supported by ongoing visits to customers and prospects. *Developing a company-wide go-to-market plan, working with all departments to execute, analysing potential partnerships for the solution. *Writing clear product/solutions requirements, based on market-driven feedback from customers and prospects. *Working with marketing communications to define the go-to-market strategy, helping to understand the solution/product positioning, key benefits, and target customers. *To ensure the 'avant-gardism' of the solutions proposed. *To centralize all info on ongoing networking project status/issues.

As a Solution Architect at Siemens Communications it was my job to support the account manager at any customer site. After an in-depth analysis of the customer needs, I designed the solution and defend this to the customer. Solutions encompass: · Data-networks: Switching & Routing (Cisco, Enterasys, Huawei, Nortel) · Voice networks with Siemens’ HiPath products: TDM, Voice over IP (H323, SIP), Unified Messaging, Presence Based Communications · Multimedia Contact Center and IVR/VRU designs · Computer Telephony Integration with customers’ software via Siemens middleware In this pre-sales function teaming with all parts of the organization was essential (services, financial department, development …) as was creativity and thinking out-of-the box.

In this job, I started with the implementation of Multimedia Contact Centers and IVR systems. I matured quickly towards consultancy and application integration. Application Integration means analyzing and implementing the integration between products, software, databases … that are needed in the solutions. This is done in close collaboration with Customer Solutions or Back Office/sales. Besides the delivery of integration assistance to the organization, it was my mission to: · deliver content to the knowledge base (installation procedures, configurations and test plans) · Train customers and Siemens technicians · Design and consult in contact center call flows