Kent Stroker Email & Phone Number

Seattle, Wa, Us

Seattle, Wa, Us

New York, Ny, Us

Build with CockroachDB Now — Seamless multi-region scale with CockroachDB. Business-critical data, always accessible. Scale your database on-demand with CockroachDB. Zero downtime in production. 100% ACID. ACID transactions. Horizontal Scale. Geo-location of data. Cloud-Neutral. Cloud Native.

I helped a startup learn to grow and operationalize Neo4j in GKE Kubernetes, Creating Kubernetes services for backup, recovery, updates, and growth and developing advanced Helm charts to better automate DevOps and adding a database migration tool to capture changes and drift in the database schemas between environments and reviewing queries and schema, identifying possible problem areas and remediating.

San Mateo, Ca, Us

Currently thriving as a Pre-Sales Graph Database Engineer with Neo4j in the vibrant Pacific Northwest, I am an integral part of a dedicated pre-sales team renowned for its track record of success. In this multifaceted role, I engage in a comprehensive journey with our clients, guiding them from their initial inquiry through discovery, enablement, and proof of concept, to the successful closing of deals. My passion lies in not just meeting but exceeding customer expectations, and ensuring their success with our solutions. The joy of empowering our clients and contributing to their achievements far surpasses the satisfaction of meeting sales targets for me.Navigating through the ever-evolving landscape of graph database technology presents a stimulating array of technical challenges that fuel my professional growth. The integration of Generative AI (GenAI) into our solutions, is a cutting-edge development that promises to redefine the possibilities within data analysis and customer interaction. Learning Cypher has enabled me to unlock the potential of graph databases, facilitating complex data modeling and efficient data loading processes. Beyond the technicalities of database management, I delve into the intricacies of analytics and visualization, crafting intuitive representations of complex datasets that empower our clients with actionable insights. This continuous pursuit of knowledge and expertise in the latest technologies ensures that we not only meet the dynamic needs of our customers but also anticipate future trends.The pre-sales role requires both breadth and depth of skills. Being able to work fluently in Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google GCP; or Docker and Kubernetes is necessary. Knowing various data engineering techniques, ETL and ingest pipelines, including streaming is needed. Providing sizing and scaling estimates, backup and monitoring methods - and many related topics require continual self-education and experimenting.

Palo Alto, Ca, Us

VMware Pulse was a startup product team inside. Pulse was a new concept in device management for IoT applications. In that, it was neutral to hardware and software, focusing solely on the device management aspect and not with the data ingest aspect.My primary roles were pre-sales technical activities, including initial presentations, discovery, follow-up technical deep dives, POC scoping, delivering POCs, and post-sales hand-off to professional services. The west coast was my primary account territory; however, being a small team, we often covered the whole of the US and some European accounts. Our product team worked closely with the Dell Technologies account teams for IoT and Edge. In this role, we worked a very wide range of development boards, silicon, and operating systems. Primarily we worked Intel x86_64 and ARM aarch64 as the dominant silicon masks running some flavor of Ubuntu, Debian, and Windows.

Redmond, Washington, Us

IoT Ecosystem team is responsible for engaging with OEM, SI, SA, ISV and other partners globally to deliver embedded, client-server experiences based on Microsoft, Azure and Open Source technologies that drive cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. Work with emerging technologies, sensors, processors and cloud services to orchestrate end-to-end solutions never seen before. In this job role, I work with sensors and development boards to create devices that are in turn connected to the cloud using IoT Hub, MQTT, Kafka, persisted the data (both streaming and traditional RDBMS) and fed into AL/ML systems. Designed the end-to-end cloud infrastructures to digest the data, store and perform reporting, analytics, bots, voice-enablement, machine learning and apply artificial intelligence to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the technologies, provided tailored education that empowers partners to deliver IoT-based solutions which in turn drive adoption, acceptance, and revenue.

Redmond, Washington, Us

OEM/SA/SI Enablement – Worked on assigned global OEM/SI/SA accounts helping these partners become better cloud-enabled and to help discover, plan, POC, build and deliver fast-track projects. I have provided on-site and virtual cloud education to internal teams who need to understand and make the pivot from traditional solutions to deploying modern cloud services that delivered enhanced analytics to stakeholders. Provide bridged technical support for internal teams came up to speed on the cloud, IoT and other cloud-based technologies.Azure Sphere – Was a key part of the Azure Sphere MT-3620 product roll-out. This new, super secure MCU required the creation of “Train-the-Trainer” workshops, lab and lectures. I have worked with NCD.io to create hats, shields and development boards for advancing the labs and hands-on educational materials to support the MT-3620 roll-out.IoT in Action Global Tour with FRIDG-E – Was tasked with developing an on-stage, live demonstration that shows the journey of an unconnected, analog refrigerator through digital transformation into a connected, smart refrigerator. This project took a few months and involved 34 sensors, fabricating 3D printing of parts, Azure cloud services (IoT Hub, Functions, Cosmo DB, SQL Server, Windows VM/Java) and a fair bit of Windows C and C# programming.Microsoft/Hackster.io 2017 Road Show – Developed content and delivered an eleven (11) city and two (2) virtual broadcast hands-on boot camps. I have reached over 2500 attendees who built a simple IoT device and cloud-based, end-to-end solution in 6 hours.

Armonk, New York, Ny, Us

Was invited to transition from my previous successful role into being more focused on open source analytics products, like Hadoop and Spark fit into the emerging IBM Bluemix cloud ecosystem. Workered with data engineers and data scientists to help them better understand the IBM offerings and how they may fit-replace "legacy" tools like Netezza and Cognos; or better, how to extend the life of those investments by adding fuctionality via the open source offerings without totally disruption existing business processes. I often would use hands-on workshops involving simple IoT devices as the "data source" to illustrate how data flows from soure-to-analytics. What was most rewarding about this approach it is how it empowered data scientist - who are often at the back-end of the chain-of-data - to better appreciate how data to generated, gathered, stored, cleansed, curated and presented to them. Education is empowered and is a powerful method for gaining consensus and agreement.

Armonk, New York, Ny, Us

Joined IBM as a Cloudant NoSQL database global team member covering Pacific Northwest and surrounding territories, subsequent reorganization saw the job role expand to include the entire cloud data services portfolio (DB2, dashDB, and others) for the West coast and created several new, unique demonstrations, presentations, lunch-and-learns to highlight the features and differentiators of the technologies. Many of resulted in POT and POCs. It became evident that to be successful with cloud-based databases, there needed to be better cloud enablement around IBM Bluemix and SoftLayer. Created hands-on workshops to help enable people with IBM Bluemix. Being a heavy open source advocate, emphasized how open standards ensure customer freedom of choice and agility.To drive additional and more detailed knowledge around Cloudant, dashDB, Big Insights, Spark and Watson, developed a series of deep, fast-paced, live workshops around combining Bluemix services. I have built several Internet of Things “devices” based on Arduino – all feeding live data into Bluemix, Cloudant and analytics tools like Cognos. Advanced the learning by using public, larger datasets to show how to design Cloudant to feed dashDB; and in turn, the rest of the analytics stack - used open source tooling for these demos including Node-RED and dweet.io.

Arlington, Va, Us

Boeing initiated a large, enterprise-wide project to convert many aspects of IT to “as a Service” in 2013. My Oracle knowledge, end-to-end infrastructure hardware skills (server, network, storage, OS) and virtualization skills (VMWare), earned me the lead architect role for the DBaaS project. I researched and authored the business case to treat this as a “green field” project and conducted a deep “current state” evaluation of the Oracle and SQL Server population and resource usage. The decision was made to pivot away from building out physical servers and virtualize the entire database practice on this private cloud deployment. Working with various internal departments (data center, server, network, storage, OS, security, database, finance and others) and the database end-user community crafted a policy, sizing buckets, operations, SLA and everything else expected of a “cloud provider” to build out the first POC system and after successfully testing a small population moved to full-scale deployment.

Arlington, Va, Us

Technical lead for the team responsible for 55% of Oracle databases for all of Boeing – totaling around ~18000 instances and ~10 PB’s of storage. A mixture of hardware and operating systems, a wide span of Oracle versions and mixture database deployment models – RAC, Stand-Alone, Data Guard, and Golden Gate. Support was 365/24/7 and as the technical lead was the final escalation point. High visibility operations support, often working with business partners (internal and external) and Boeing senior management in various divisions, especially during outages impacting production lines. Able to stay cool and focused during production outages and also for explaining technical things to non-technical people, with diplomacy and clarity

Mclean, Va, Us

TRAVELOCITY.COM - Part of team building a new data center from scratch. Historically has outsourced data center operations and is bringing it all in-house, they needed people who have done this before. Reviewed proposed design, made several infrastructure changes to eliminate points of failure and bottlenecks. Used Golden Gate to replicate existing production systems to staging servers. Used Data Guard to get data to 9-Node RAC cluster running seven (7) asymmetric databases. Cascading Data Guard to then replicate to a local and remote 3-node RAC disaster recovery system. Hybrid system running 11gR2 Grid supporting 11gR2 and 10gR2 databases. Heavy use of name services and tighten security to DISA and PCI standards. Some databases +6TB in size. Total database footprint 28TB.

Large US Steel Mill - Designed and deployed the database-tier for the multi-vendor MES system – the backbone of a $6.6B steel mill recently built near Mobile. Recommended Oracle Standard Edition and Quest FogLight; this saved millions in license and support costs over a five (5) year period while yielding a 100% HA solution. Setup PXE/Kickstart/YUM for provisioning and patching hardware. Automated Oracle product installs and database builds. Performed detailed benchmarking and fault tolerance testing of entire infrastructure. Hybrid 11gR1/10gR2 deployment. Used Data Guard to establish local DR system and ASM mirroring across the sites. Served as system administrator, SAN engineer and DBA; trusted advisor role to CTO/CIO. Assisted developers work out logical schema problems, poorly performing code, RAC tuning challenges and some ODBC/JDBC connection problems. Wrote documentation for daily operations, patching and “as-built” procedures. Mentored TKS IT staff to assume all duties.

Virginia Beach, Va, Us

Worked many projects for Mythics, I include this one as showcase project (and Mythics still does).Martin County Florida - Extended RAC (2 Mile)Martin County needed a cost effective high availability and disaster recovery solution. Original design was a 4-Node at primary and another 4-Node at remote. Discovery revealed dark fiber had already been run between the sites. The use of Extended RAC was proposed – resulting in a 50% cost savings while providing more robust and survivable deployment. Built a 4-Node Extended RAC placing 2 nodes at each site with localized NetApp iSCSI storage. Used ASM mirroring to have viable disks in each site. The design was deployed and grew to a 6-Node; bringing all County and some City databases into a consolidated system, saving the taxpayers a great deal of money.

Round Rock, Texas, Us

Worked many customer projects for Dell, PSS World Medical Project is a notable one to share.Customer outgrown their data warehouse (DW)/business intelligence (BI) system. Desired a Linux/RAC solution around Dell blade servers and existing HP EVA storage. A number of show stopping blade, network and storage issues required multiple vendor assistance to resolve. Knowledge transfer was key part of this project as this was the first Linux and RAC system for this team. The PSS SA and DBA teams did the work under my watchful eye; using the project as a “giant hands on lab” was able to deliver meaningful education and deliver the project at the same time – PSS management loved this. This client has been so happy with my work they routinely call me up or ask me to fly out for a few days to help tweak the system.

New data center build out in Tokyo managing a team of ~40 people as direct reports and a dozen Azora resources. Supported all production, test and development Oracle projects. Supported SAP G/L, SAP BASEL2, Golden Source, TIBCO, Documentum, BASEL2 Transformation Engine, ISA, Core Banking Mainframe Feed, and Oracle Collaboration Suite. Deployed a large, highly available Oracle Enterprise Manager system for all Oracle control functions; linked OEM to TIBCO Hawk.• Managed multi-national DBA team supporting +150 database servers and +2000 databases• Created Japanese/English run books for all databases• Oracle/EMC technologies such as SRDF and BCV, mirrors and snaps in relation to ASM• EMC software products for virtual tape backup and compliance archival storage (Legato)• 10 domains, 3 languages and multiple countries Oracle Collaboration Suite (Beehive)

Austin, Texas, Us

Began as a database pre-sales consultant covering strategic accounts in the Northwest. Very skilled at helping customers understand the database and core technology stack; helped design, sell and delivery solutions. Introduced to Linux and RAC in pre-beta stage and quickly became the west coast “smoke jumper” for RAC; conducting pre-sales calls, workshops, proof of concepts and post-sales installations. Wrote several internal white papers and was a much sought after presenter at conferences and local user groups. Grew into an expert in Oracle on Linux and multiple high availability architectures. • Acknowledged RAC and Linux expert• Answered RFI/RFPs and Recommended Infrastructure Architecture• Installations, Benchmarking and Proof of Concepts• Supported sales teams in existing opportunities and an ability to uncover and create additional opportunity• Excellent Demonstration and Presentation Skills• Northwest Sales Consultant of the Year, 1999• Sales Consultant of the Year West, 2000• Liaison and Founder for Puget Sound Oracle Users Group (PSOUG)

As, Graphic Arts, Computer Science

High School Diploma, College/University Preparatory And Advanced High School/Secondary Diploma Program