Meet Matt Tyrer, the Founder and Chief Analyst at the Competitive Corner. Matt is 20 years an IT veteran with focus on data protection. Formerly a Unix system administrator, Matt has spent the last 15 years at Commvault where he engineered a Competitive Intelligence Program. After his success leading the program, he went on to form his own consultancy, The Competitive Corner, doing market research and competitive analysis for businesses. As a long-time professional, one of the biggest challenges Matt faces is the hype cycle roller coaster. For Matt, keeping up with new trends is about drilling into the macro and micro factors. To achieve a well-rounded understanding of any technology, one has to be on a constant learning curve, he says. And when it comes to learning, Matt says his go-to resource is Tech Field Day presentations, where he learns about technology specifications and use cases from an user standpoint. Remembering his early years in IT, Matt said that he entered the industry with a clean slate. He did not have the coding background of some of his peers, but Matt had something far more important – a mastery in logic which served him well with technical problem-solving. Matt got his first taste of computer in the Atari 2600, a home video game console, which he played on a black and white TV. When asked what an alternative career might have been for him, Matt’s answer was to own a pub and tend the bar. Welcome to the club, Matt, and thank you for joining us for Tech Field Day Extra at VMware Explore US 2023!
Connect with Matt
Matt Tyrer is the Founder and Chief Analyst at The Competitive Corner. You can connect with Matt on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Visit The Competitive Corner website to learn more about Matt and the company.
Transcript:
Tom Hollingsworth: Welcome to Gestalt IT.
Matt Tyrer: Hi I’m Matt Tyrer.
Tom: Hi Matt Welcome to our meet the delegate discussion with you. Tell us a little bit about who you are.
Well, I was born and raised inOttawa but a 20 plus year veteran in IT starting in the data center so I actually start my first job was starting as a Unix system administrator and then through that learned the ropes of data center got introduced into the vendor space. At that point worked for a number of vendors, actually worked for a poker company at one point and then transitioned into the data protection space. So where I spent the last 15 years at Commvault serving on the sales side and the marketing side and then helping to build out their competitive intelligence program before going out and building my own CI consultancy group called The Competitive Corner.
Tom: Sounds like you’ve had a a pretty wide breadth of skills in your IT career. What’s been one of the biggest challenges that you faced trying to keep up with everything?
Matt: You know, the next turn on that hype cycle is you know as depending on which analysts. You talk to and if you look at some of the discussions it’s like well data protection well how has that changed? What are there some of the new applications coming out? What you know, how does that need to be adjusted for the changes in cyber security? You know, Kubernetes you know, just throw another wrench in there in terms of something new. You know anyone who’s been in this industry you know for any period of time can understand that the environments are getting more complex they’re getting more diverse. You know we’re not we’re never going to see one vendor owning the whole floor especially in the Enterprise. You know maybe your smaller and midsize stuff so having to try and keep a prize of what everyone is doing in the market where the market as a whole at the macro side is going and then trying to understand well what are the things that I absolutely absolutely need to be sharp on and then learning so lots of learning.
Tom: So you mentioned learning is a challenge. It’s something that people need to keep up with. What are some of your favorite ways to learn about technology?
Matt: Well you know and this is not a plug but when I need to learn about you know what a product or a solution actually does you know in you know cutting through the marketing and stuff like that I’ve frequently tuned into the Tech Field Days from Gestalt IT because you know you’re crew has always been a No Holds Barred group that doesn’t put up with you know people skating on any thin ice. So they’re very good way of learning you know about how a product works, what does it do, what you know how you know what are the use cases is for it. Beyond that you know YouTube is your friend. LinkedIn has some great posts from thought leaders as well. It’s really trying to to research okay well who are the experts in this particular field and then seeing what are they looking at what are they researching who are they talking to and just trying to expand from there. So some are a little hit and miss at times but you know eventually you kind of find the channels that are a little bit more dependable and then you can start learning and building out that knowledge base.
Tom: I like that answer. What was your first computer?
My first computer, so I’ll start with I’m going to preface this because I got a computer fairly later in my childhood but my first video game device was the Atari 2600, played on a black and white TV and I didn’t realize that video games had color until we actually got a new TV and I was like wow these things have color! But my first computer was a 386. You know got to install Wing Commander and all those fun games on on there. I never really did any coding or anything like that so it was really quite a challenge to first get into it you know when you didn’t really have that tinkering background. You weren’t building systems, tearing them down, doing a lot of the play things but I just found it really interesting because one of my going all the way back to University things that I was good at was understanding logic and so you know when you were troubleshooting things in it there was a logical pattern to it well if this happened then this is why it happened and I can figure this out from that. Now obviously it’s gotten a lot more complex since then but it was that problem solving element that certainly got me into it and that I’ve enjoyed you know, throughout that career. It’s just like what’s the next challenge, what’s the next problem, how do I understand it, how do I solve it.
Tom: So if you weren’t working in IT what would you be doing?
Matt: If I won the the Powerball and could do whatever I’d want, I’d probably open a pub and just tend the bar to be honest. Yeah. I’ve always been a people person and it just seems you know I know a lot of people in the brewing community and it would be just be a fun thing to do just get to know that your community get to know people and I think that would be fun, but right now my my current challenge is building IT, my latest venture which is the competitive corner so my last role you know before branching out on my own was building managing running a competitive intelligence program at a large company and I really enjoyed that because that space changes all the time you just don’t know you could wake up tomorrow and somebody bought somebody else or you know this person left that company went over there and you know so it’s so dynamic and I really enjoyed that and so and what I found was uh when I looked across not just the industry that I was in but across many different markets, IT was something that there were two extremes of. There was you know the big Enterprise companies that had you know a team of five to ten people that were running you know a formalized program or it was there was nobody and it was completely done ad hoc tribal knowledge and all that information was just scattered all over the place and and typically lost and so you know having had experience building successful programs I decided you know what there’s a need for people to get some structure, formalize our programs you know and maybe they don’t dedicate people but maybe I can come in and help.
Tom: Well Matt, thank you very much for an opportunity to meet you and learn a little bit more about who you are. I know that our audience out there will really appreciate knowing a little bit about who you are and some of the cool stuff that you’ve done. If you want to see more great meet the delegate interviews with us please make sure you check out GestaltIT.com and if you want to see Matt in action with a lot of the other cool delegates that we have here at VMware Explore 2023 make sure you go to TechFieldDay.com and look for Tech Field Day Extra at VMware Explore2023 where you’ll get to see great videos featuring Matt and S several other delegates.
