Niall Thomson
Senior Solution Architect - AWS
- EMAIL : thomson.niall@gmail.com
- LOCATION : San Jose, CA, USA
Technology is something I've been interested in as long as I remember, and there was never any question what I would choose to do for a living. I've always been interested in learning everything and anything I can in order to build things that work, and thats propagated through to my career, where I've never dwelled in one area for long. Now I spend my time working on anything from application architecture, cloud infrastructure strategy and automation, and Devops processes and culture.
I was fortunate to be offered the opportunity to move my life from Scotland to the USA in 2012. I've grabbed that chance and never looked back. In the time since I've spent several years on both coasts and visited everywhere I can in between.
In my spare time I like to do some hiking, indoor rock climbing and drinking all the beer I can get my hands on. During the winter I like to do a bad impression of someone who knows how to snowboard.
At Verint my role was to help drive technology and organizational change that would enable the company to transition its key products to the cloud. This was a key part of a change in strategy to begin to leverage SaaS business models in addition to its tradition of on-premise and hosted deployments.
As a member of the Kana Software Professional Services team in the US, I worked with multiple high profile clients in order to deliver customized solutions based on the Kana Enterprise CRM platform. This included:
During this period I was involved in the successful delivery of multiple high-profile systems for these clients under tight timescales and budgets. Additionally, I developed an automated testing framework specific to the Kana Enterprise CRM product based on Selenium. This transformed the ability of our project team developers to build and maintain automated UI tests in a productive, scalable and maintainable manner.
During this time I worked as a member of the R&D team to develop the base Sword Ciboodle CRM product. The responsibilities included:
My areas of focus included significant work on telephony platform integration, case management and campaign management. I also made a number of contributions in the form of personal projects, driven by my desire to develop personally as an engineer and improve the product suite in general. I was formally recognized multiple times for such projects during this time.
As part of the Sales Engineering team at Sword Ciboodle I was responsible for:
Working in this role allowed me to quickly develop and understanding of the requirements of CRM systems across multiple sectors including insurance, telecommunications and utilities. I was also given the opportunity to build on my presentations and demo skills in front of technical audiences.