by Josh Arrington
Today, July 29, 2011, marked another excellent SysAdmin Appreciation Day and the Cyber-Ark team is thrilled to have played a role in recognizing the efforts of these IT rock stars. As you know, on Monday, we kicked off our 2nd Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day Contest by asking participants to answer this simple question over Twitter: “What is your greatest enterprise IT accomplishment in the past year?”
As the responses rolled in, our esteemed judges, Standalone SysAdmin’s Matt Simmons, Cyber-Ark’s Bill Pesiridis, and the NubbyAdmin’s Wesley David, analyzed their merits and began to formulate their thoughts on who should be crowned the “winner.” While the judges determined that there were some truly exceptional responses, and that all of the achievements deserved recognition (more on that later), one stood out from the pack.
Without further ado, on behalf of our judges, we would like to formally declare Thomas Deliduka, aka @Tomnibus, as this year’s winner! Here’s the winning Tweet:
@tomnibus “@CyberArk Greatest Accomplishment: upgraded Exchange 2003->2010 on my own for 100+ users, two weeks start to finish, no hiccups #SysAdminDay”
The judges agreed that this was a significant achievement. For Wesley, Thomas’s response marked a serious accomplishment. An Exchange 2003-2010 rollout is no easy task, you can read more about that type of migration here, and he was impressed with the speed and efficiency. For Matt—the complexity of this type of project stood out from the pack. Bill concurred—he’s actually tackled the project himself and agrees that it is a daunting task. E-mail is a critical application for the end-user, and it can be very difficult to find the downtime to pull this migration off.
So there you have it once again—congrats Thomas! You’ll be hearing more from @Cyberark as you are soon to be the proud recipient of our grand prize—an Amazon Kindle.
But wait, there’s more. Wesley, Matt and Bill would like to recognize the efforts of the other participants who they deemed “honorable mentions”, as this was a very close competition. Check back next week for a new blog post that details their thought process when selecting the winner and these “finalists”—and stay tuned, especially, if you were a participant. We’ll be reaching out to you to learn more about your achievements. After all, in Matt’s words, while Thomas’ achievement was very impressive, “we could select any of these responses justifiably.” So great job participants—in true recognition of SysAdminDay, you provided us with some excellent insights into the great work you do on a daily basis. You truly deserve even more than just a day of celebration!
