Interview with Mr. Chris Simants

Date of interview:

11/1/17

Summary:

I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Chris Simants, the Owner of Siotra Consulting LLC. We discussed Mr. Simants’s background, the work he does with different clients, and touched upon the importance of staying up to date with technology. Through this interview, I was able to get more exposure to a different aspect of computer engineering, infrastructure design. I was also introduced to various methodologies. Mr. Simants’s even mentioned the value of certifications and self-learning.

Interview:

We began by discussing Mr. Simants’s background. Mr. Simants has experience working in large corporate companies like Oracle and Microsoft. He was a Sr. Systems Engineer at Corvel, where he aided in the development of Corporate Data Centers of 400+ Windows Servers; later he was a Lab Manager at Microsoft where he managed the BOSG lab space of ~2500 physical devices; he then became a Systems Engineer, and then a Service Operations Manager at Microsoft. He later was a Sr. Systems Architect at Imaginet where designed and configured SCOM 2012 services implementation to enable monitoring of multiple customer environments securely as well as various other developments.

Mr. Simants is currently the owner of Siotra Consulting LLC where he works with various clients to provide IT and infrastructure support and services. As the owner of Siotra Consulting LLC, Mr. Simants with small and medium-sized businesses with enterprise level attention and without the burden of a large enterprise staff. He provides various services including: Strategic IT planning for short and long-term goals, Health reviews of current Microsoft deployments, Technology adoption recommendations, Line of business software, industry-specific solution analysis, Business continuity and disaster recovery planning, Managed services, Migration services, Lync, Exchange, SharePoint, AD DS, and Cloud Solutions. He mainly creates infrastructure designs to support IT needs for every type of company and service including SharePoint, Azure, and Office 365.

We then discussed what Mr. Simants thought are upcoming technologies that could have a significant impact on the tech industry. Mr. Simants mentioned that VR, AR, MR, and other experience-enhancing technologies would continue to be developed for general consumer usage and development. He also touched upon Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, and Big Data as a few more booming tech industries. We talked a little bit about the impact Artificial Intelligence can have and how it could impact our day to day lives. We also discussed the importance of big data and how it could soon make predictions more accurately and faster than humans and that combined with the power of Artificial Intelligence could be extremely useful. Mr. Simants mentioned the expected growth of cybersecurity and how it needed for the thousands and thousands of devices being added to the world networks every day.

Overall, talking to Mr. Simants was a great learning opportunity, as I was able to gain exposure to infrastructure design and learned more about the different methodologies involved in those processes. I was also able to get more information about having your clients and how to get clients and the importance of staying up to date with the most recent innovations in technology; I also got Mr. Simants’s thoughts on where technology could be headed and how it could be used in to have a more significant impact on varying environments.