Employee Spotlight: Q&A with Dino DiCandia, Principal Professional Services Architect at Nasuni

Nasuni sat down with Dino DiCandia, Principal Professional Services Architect at Nasuni, to reflect on the early days of the company and explore how his philosophy has shaped the evolution of professional services at Nasuni.

Q: For anyone who is not familiar with professional services, what does your role involve?

At the 10,000 foot level, professional services ensures that when a customer invests in Nasuni they aren’t just buying software that may never be installed, but buying a successful outcome resulting in renewals and expansions. When a new customer onboards, it is our job to make sure they make well-educated design decisions, and to lead them through the heavy lifting of migrating their data with the greatest ease possible.

Q: How did you first get into professional services?

I’ve actually been in this role since elementary school. Being about the only person at the school with a PC at home when the school received PCs (right around the time Van Halen released their 1984 album), I was recruited to install and walk the staff through using them. That pattern followed me through high school and straight into my career. My first implementer position was helping a friend build a Novell networking business which led to a role helping Digital Equipment Corporation develop their West Coast field service organization for PCs. Looking back, the transition from “tech kid” to professional services felt like a very natural progression.

Q: Do you remember how you first heard about Nasuni and what made you want to work here?

My career has been riding the wave of new technological changes rolling across the globe. While in the electronic archive and discovery space, a small company I worked for was acquired by Iron Mountain and I ended up reporting to a guy by the name of John Gniadek, a leader I deeply respected for his human-centric approach. When he transitioned to Nasuni, we kept in contact and when he was looking to build a PS team, I could see the world was moving in the direction of the cloud and Nasuni’s approach was very interesting. So I thought, “Ah, might as well jump”.

Q: What does a typical day look like in your role as Principal Professional Services Architect?

I’ve always believed that no matter how many “Senior” or “Principal” modifiers are added to a title you should always have a hand on the day-to-day to be most effective. My typical day is split between the front lines onboarding new Nasuni customers, jumping into pre-sales calls with potential customers, Technical Design Reviews (TDR) of new customer opportunities or expansions and participating in our Critical Account Process (CAP) for customers who have hit a major roadblock either during onboarding or down the road.

Q: You joined Nasuni in 2013. How has professional services at Nasuni evolved in the time you’ve been there?

Often, customers buy technology and it sits on a shelf and never gets installed. When I started at Nasuni back in 2013, the goal was just to make sure that they took the product off the shelf, started using it, and ideally renewed or expanded the license when the year came up.

Philosophically, I’ve always been a huge advocate for training. I believe it is key to the long-term success of a customer. A year into my tenure, a few teammates and I built our first instructor lead course, elements of which have been incorporated into the knowledge transfer delivered as part of the PS onboarding process. More recently, Jean Marie Elkins, our Head of Customer Enablement, has done a great job turning the instructor-lead course into online trainings in the Nasuni University. The original PS process for onboarding new customers has also continued to be expanded upon and refined in both the Core and Custom PS teams. It’s been great to see people taking all those pieces originally developed in Nasuni’s early days and running with them.

Q: Thirteen years at one company is impressive! Do you have any formative memories from across your time at Nasuni?

The “Natick days” were definitely a unique era! Our office was situated in the middle of a very strange, busy intersection. We all stayed at the hotel directly across the roadway, which meant every morning and afternoon involved a high-stakes game of real-life “Frogger” just to get to our desks and back. It was a bonding experience that I think anyone from that era looks back on with a lot of nostalgia.

Q: How big was Nasuni at the time?

To give you an idea of the scale: back then, we were pushing to make a terabyte the minimum purchase size. A standard migration was maybe 300-500 gigabytes. If we landed a customer with 10 terabytes, that was a “whale.” Seeing where we are now, handling petabytes of data as the norm, really puts the evolution of cloud storage into perspective.

Q: To help people get to know you better, can you tell us what you enjoy doing when you’re not in the office?

My life outside of managing terabytes revolves around my wonderful wife and our three-and-a-half-year-old daughter. When I’m not architecting and training, I’m usually fully submersed in “Dad mode,” spending every spare minute with my little munchkin. She’s definitely the most important project I’ve ever worked on!

If you’d like to be part of the next chapter at Nasuni, you can find our latest career opportunities here.