A Day in the Life: Technical Account Managers (TAM) for Data Center and Cloud Solutions

As a Technical Account Manager (TAM) at INAP, I advocate for customers, working with them closely to understand their solution’s technical details and using my industry knowledge to advise them for growth. I partner with both C-level executives and their support staff to keep their unique IT environments stable.

The customers I’m assigned to support are different in many ways, but they all know they can call me any time with confidence. I usually talk with the customers I’m assigned to at least every other day, if not every day. As a TAM, I must know each customers’ solution from a technical standpoint and within the context of their business environment and vision.

Across the global reach of our 53 data centers in 21 markets, INAP’s TAMs are assigned to specific customers, serving as their point of contact to ensure continuity and efficiency.

The Day-to-Day of a Technical Account Manager

This role is often extremely satisfying—like when a customer expands to a new data center after deploying a large number of bare metal servers, and then I’m able to see how smoothly their test cases and support are handled.

There are also, of course, unexpected situations that arise: cut fiber, hardware failure or a particularly urgent support ticket. Those situations are educational in the end though, because as a TAM, I get to see the bigger picture and take steps to keep those issues from occurring again.

There are three specific areas that I am responsible for as a TAM: subject matter expertise, operational efficiency and keeping abreast of industry trends and relevant news.

Subject Matter Expertise

INAP TAMs are subject matter experts in many technology segments. I speak with customers daily about virtual machines, Open Stack (API), Windows, Linux, bandwidth, latency, security, backups, compliance and so much more. Having an understanding of a wide breadth of customer concerns empowers TAMs to speak intelligently not just with customers, but also with the INAP account and support teams.

This is how we are able to do everything from finalizing the statement of work for a new purchase order to resolving thorny technical issues.

Operational Efficiency

As a TAM, I am also involved with the customer’s maintenance activities and their tests before and after any major changes, such as upgrades to software, hardware or their network. This work often includes writing the methods of procedures that are followed during planned maintenance, reviewing recent support tickets and analyzing customer environments. The analysis that I do involves monitoring the storage, bandwidth, Simple Network Management protocol (SNMP) and security events.

Staying Ahead of the Curve

I also review the latest white papers and newsletters to stay up to date on the different technologies each customer uses, including Microsoft WSUS patches, VMware, NETAPP and vendor updates. INAP customers need these latest updates and details to stay compliant, agile and secure. The TAM helps make that happen with minimal distraction by staying involved with our customer environments and bringing relevant information on trends and new technology to the table when useful.

TAMs are also exposed to all of INAP’s products and solutions. This enables us to offer expert advice to our customers on taking full advantage of INAP’s services to optimize their IT infrastructure. The vision that INAP shares with the TAM exponentially increases the ability to help our customers achieve their goals and plan successfully.

We are involved in the growth of data center space, network bandwidth expansions and the daily achievements accomplished as INAP orchestrates behind-the-scenes maintenance and upgrades. We test the latest hardware for performance increases—as with our bare metal solutions—and ensure the security is in place to keep our customers’ environments stable and compliant. Since we are part of these tasks, we are able to describe the benefits and details to our customers throughout the process.

TAMs are equipped to use all this information to assist customers with proactive solutions and best practices for recommended changes to production. As TAMs, our commitment to you is to be honest, empathetic and exceed expectations, whether you’re using INAP Colocation, Cloud or Network solutions. Across all of our product offerings, an INAP TAM can support you from day one.