Ben Peckham

Tell us a little about your role

I'm a systems engineer at Juniper Networks, which means I spend my day learning and working with the latest networking and security technologies. My technical role in a sales team means I design, demonstrate and work with network architectures on Juniper-driven solutions. I help sell our technologies to empower and enable networking teams all over the country and ultimately connect people together. A typical day for me includes:

• Learning the cutting edge, whether this be in wireless, switching, routing, security, data centre, etc.
• Answering technical customer questions (RFP/RFI and putting this into a Bill of Materials).
• Designing network and security solutions.
• Demonstrating our technologies to customers.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

As a systems engineer, I get the best of both worlds. On one side this means working on technical solutions, for example data centre fabric deployments. At the same time, I'm in sales which brings the opportunity of visiting customers on-site and connecting.

What advice would you give to those wanting to follow in your footsteps?

Be enthusiastic in what you do every day knowing it can help someone else. Work relentlessly for what you want. A strong can-do attitude can carry you a long way!

How do you feel your studies at Solent helped prepare you for your career?

From a technical perspective, everything I needed for a graduate position was provided through my course. I remember in my first interview with Juniper, sitting in front of a whiteboard and being asked: "How would you design a campus network?" and we'd recently covered this in a lecture. Plus, presentations to the rest of my class really helped as I now present to customers.