About the Author

Matthew Steiner is an experienced presales consultant with a career stretching back over 25 years in the IT industry, the last 16 years of which have been spent providing presales support for technology vendors.

He started his career as a PC engineer in the North East of England and then spent 7 years providing technical support and working on IT projects for The Royal Bank of Scotland.

In 2000, he moved into presales, first with Compaq and then HP and IBM, working with both x86 and UNIX architectures before moving into the software industry with VMware. He is currently a Lead Systems Engineer (SE) at VMware and has spent the last 3 years as a Cloud Management Platform Specialist SE. His focus is on vRealize Operations for which he is the presales lead in the UK.

Apart from the 'day job', providing technical sales support, Matthew is a regular contributor and speaker at events and conferences such as VMworld and local VMware User Groups (VMUGs), and is VMware's technical sponsor for the Scottish VMUG.

This is Matthew's first book, although he has also authored two Hands on Labs for VMware as well as white papers and other training materials throughout his career. He also maintains a blog at SEinTheCloud.wordpress.com, where he writes about his experiences as a presales consultant and the technologies he is working with.

Thank you to Jayne for putting up with me spending many evenings and weekends writing, and thank you to our cats, Lizzie and Smithy, for distracting me at times and standing on my keyboard!

Also, thank you to all my colleagues who helped me with ideas and support, particularly Peter Von Oven, who initially inspired me to write, and has mentored me through the process. Thanks also to the VMware OneCloud and Hands on Labs teams, without those environments I could not have written this book.