Speaking#

I have worked most of the formats a sales engineer gets asked to cover: recorded webinars, trade show floors, hands-on customer workshops, a university lecture hall, and the room where a deal on the critical path gets negotiated.

Spotlight: Realtime Management#

A Syxsense Master Class, delivered as the vendor’s technical presenter.

Realtime endpoint management and vulnerability management were the categories I spent the most time on at Syxsense, both in front of prospects and inside the product. The webinar was one part of that job. The rest was proofs of concept, architecture sessions, and RFI and RFP responses for customers in critical infrastructure and government, where the scanning and remediation story has to hold up against a regulator as well as a security team.

Rooms I have presented in#

The biggest audiences were at Black Hat USA, from the stage in our booth amphitheater, one of the largest on the show floor, in front of a few hundred people at a time. Working a show floor turns out to be its own skill, and most of it is not presenting: it is qualifying a stream of strangers quickly and deciding which conversations are worth the next thirty minutes.

Customer workshops sit at the other end of that. Dozens of people at a time, working live in their own environment rather than against a canned demo, which means the session goes wherever their configuration takes it. I have also spoken at industry events on security automation in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

The one furthest outside the normal run of the job was a week-long seminar I taught at VIT-AP University in Vijayawada, India, as a visiting industry partner.

Then there are the meetings that do not look like presentations at all. Critical-path negotiations, where the technical answer decides whether the deal moves, and the person giving it has to be credible enough to be believed and willing to say no when the honest answer is no.

If you want a live version rather than a recording, I am happy to walk through any project on this site, or to take a scenario and present it back. Get in touch.