A DAY IN THE LIFE
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On the lighter side of things, we ask the industryexperts what makes them tick …
Hesham El Komy, Senior Director, Channels, Epicor Software
What would you describe as your most memorable achievement? Being recruited as the first person on the ground in the Middle East for a small open source vendor, starting from scratch and within 12 months being in a position to build a team and open a fully-serviced office, is definitely one of the highlights of my career.
What first made you think of a career in technology? It wasn’ t so much me choosing a career in technology as the other way around! My landlord during university worked at Systems Union, a provider of financial and performance management solutions. On one of his monthly visits to pick up the rent cheque, we started chatting and before long he offered me a job in marketing. I initially started out doing outbound marketing but quickly moved to database marketing and marketing systems and the rest, as they say, is history.
What style of management philosophy do you employ with your current position? I firmly believe that people perform at their best when they are given some flexibility and have a say in decision making, specifically when it comes to goals and targets. Rather than push down targets, I take a bottoms up approach – I put the onus on my associates to give me a plan that they think they can achieve and then hold them accountable. This works well and gives the team the flexibility to think outside of the box.
What do you think will be the hot technology talking point of 2016? Technology is moving very fast and having just one talking point over a single year is no longer the case. This said, in my view the next‘ big thing’ is going to be containers. Containers bring a totally new dimension as enterprises will be able to run a greater number of computing workloads on the same server, thus significantly reducing the cost of computing.
How do you deal with stress and unwind outside of the office? Outside of the office I love spending time with my two kids. They are still young so time with them completely removes me from the day to day stresses and pressures of work. We tend to swim, go to the beach or I help them with their homework. Other than that I like to watch and participate in motorsports.
If you could go back and change one career decision, what would it be? I know this might sound clichéd, and probably easier to say given where I am today, but I honestly don’ t think I would go back and change any decisions. Sure, there have been some bumps or‘ wrong turns’ along the way, but I am a firm believer that everything happens for a reason and my career is no different!
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