Friday Feature: Vlad Catrinescu

We are very excited to introduce this week’s Friday Feature— VladTalksTech! Vlad is President of a SharePoint and Office 365 Consulting firm called vNext Solutions. He has been recognized as an Office Servers and Services MVP since 2013. Read his Q&A below to learn about the tech trends he’s most interested in and what inspired him to start his blog, Absolute SharePoint.

 Vlad Catrinescu                                        

Job Title: President

Company Name: vNext Solutions   

MVP Profile

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladcatrinescu/?ppe=1

Twitter: @vladcatrinescu

Blog: https://absolute-sharepoint.com/

1. Tell l us a little bit about your current role and organization.

I am currently the President of a SharePoint and Office 365 consulting company in Montreal Canada called vNext Solutions! What we aim to do every day is to allow organizations to make the most out of their investment in Microsoft products, especially around collaboration. We do everything from training and setting up SharePoint On-Premises, Hybrid, Migrating to Office 365 as well as creating Intranets and Business Application using PowerApps and Flow! I spend my days talking to existing and potential clients on how they currently use their tools, learning their problems and showing them how they can increase productivity by using Microsoft tools.

2. What is the most challenging part of your role?

The most challenging, and fun part of my role is that no two organizations are alike.  You cannot have a single solution that will adapt to all the clients, so you need to sit down with each one of them and learn what challenges are in their day to day life, and show them how technology can make them a thing of the past!

3. How has IT changed since you first started your career?

I think the biggest change since I started my career in IT is the Cloud. We don’t need to wait 3 years anymore to get new features, they now come out every other week and it’s almost a full-time job to keep up with the new changes only in Office 365 and master the latest products, so you know how you can help your customers with them. The cloud is also allowing users to develop applications and not wait on IT, with things like PowerApps and Microsoft Flow.

4. What do you think your most valuable skill is? Why?

I think the most valuable skills is listening. In order to be able to propose a solution, the most important thing is listening to the problem, and because for every company the problem is never the same you need to listen to their whole problem, and understand it before talking about a solution.

5. What inspired you to start your blog?

I really think that SharePoint would have never reached the level where it’s at today without it’s community, and when I first started out with SharePoint, I would have probably gave up in the first month if it wasn’t for the amazing amount of information that was out there. At some point I got to a level where I was able to figure out certain bugs, and workarounds and those were not documented on TechNet or any other blog so I decided to start my own blog, so if other people ever get the same problem they will be easily able to solve it without doing all the work I did!

6. What cloud or IT trends are you paying the most attention to these days?

I think one of the best IT Trends around is the empowerment of the Business User. The latest applications such as PowerApps, Flow, PowerBI allow Business Users and Power Users to build so much more than they were able to do before, without needing to pass through IT.  This allows both the Business users to become more productive quicker, and be able to create their own applications as well as IT now has more time to focus on the more advanced innovation tasks that really require them.

7. You’re relatively early in your career- do you find that your approach to the cloud or technology in general is different than your peers who have been in IT for longer? Or do you find your approach to be similar?

Having worked for large enterprise for most of my career I think my approach is in line with other MVPs that see the benefits of the cloud, but also understand how hard it is to bring this technology to a big organization as well as change the way that people work.