Roger Austin
Core Cluster IT
The good soul of IT
Roger has been on board at virtual7 for over 18 years and has always been the good IT soul of the team. With gentle patience and expertise, he is immediately on hand when it comes to nothing less than data protection and our security in the IT infrastructure. In addition, Roger always finds time for the little things like a broken keyboard or explaining the new monitors to the less gifted among us. Anyone who can remain calm and composed during this must be a good person…
Tell us about your start at virtual7. How long have you been working here?
Longer than fifteen years for sure. If I remember correctly, this year should be the 18th. It must have been 2006 when I joined virtual7.
I came to virtual7 by chance and it was an absolute stroke of luck for me. It became clear right from the interview that virtual7 could change my life. As a young family man, I had to turn my life around after I broke off my training as a chef. IT fascinated me, I began to devour magazines on the subject and started overclocking PCs and building my own cases, which is how I ended up at virtual7 in Muggensturm. At the beginning, I didn’t know what to make of the whole thing. Far off the beaten track in a small town where the train runs every hour, I suddenly found myself sitting in a job interview with two Managing Directors who were still quite young in my eyes. The interview was anything but a typical job interview. After I had described my initial situation, I was offered an orientation year and so my virtual7 story began.
What makes your job at virtual7 unique?
During my training after the orientation year, I very quickly realized that I was given absolute trust at virtual7. Having the freedom to develop exactly where my personal strengths lie during my training is unique for me. I was never pushed in a certain direction, which was always very important to me, because I believe that you can’t plan everything in your life in advance, but that things develop over time.
How has virtual7 changed over the last 15 years?
virtual7 has grown enormously as a brand over the last few years. The first office I experienced was a converted apartment. The servers stood on wooden shelves. If you can call them servers, they were normal PC cases. So that’s absolutely no comparison to what virtual7 is today. In general, we have all become more professional and know what is important. We have developed technically, but so have all our internal structures. We have also learned to take a critical look at our mistakes and to swim against the tide and find solutions that work for us. In my opinion, virtual7 is a company that has understood how to keep pace and what it means to learn from successes and failures and to reinvent itself in order to break new ground.
What skills and knowledge do you bring to the job that are particularly important to you?
I always try to be friendly and balanced. Interpersonal aspects have become very important to me in recent years. Values are incredibly important to me. Why should I change companies just because I can earn two euros more somewhere when I can get all that at virtual 7?
How do you like the appealing company organization?
In general, I think the introduction of the responsive company organization is an important step for virtual7. You have the opportunity to approach the relevant roles in a targeted manner and get solutions to problems or queries much more quickly. Above a certain size, a company simply needs a structure. We saw that individual heads were overwhelmed by the workload, so we needed a distribution of responsibilities. I feel a little taken back to the time when we were only 15 people strong. Everyone did everything and now we have that opportunity again. Now everyone is involved and everyone has a bit of responsibility for the big picture. I think that’s a brilliant concept.
What do you particularly like about working here?
Especially in the early years at virtual7, I had to overcome some family obstacles and needed time off from time to time. That was never a problem at virtual7. I would never have had this support and understanding for my personal situation at any other company.
I am also fascinated by virtual7’s willingness to change and adapt. Who would have thought 15 years ago that the public sector could offer us so much as a company? Nevertheless, I have always felt safe and never had the urge to leave the company. It’s hard to find another company with so much confidence in the ability of its employees and the willingness to hand over so much responsibility while still retaining a great deal of humanity and enjoyment of the job.
Which roles are particularly important in your daily work?
I don’t actually have that many roles. I have now defined the areas of work that I had before the introduction of the responsive company organization as my roles. I find it very difficult to estimate the amount of time behind the roles. For example, in addition to the role of Data Protection Officer, I have the roles of Client Support and IT Asset Management. These responsibilities include advising employees on software and hardware and managing them. However, this also involves selecting, checking, evaluating, testing and installing. All in all, that’s a lot of time that has to be invested. That’s why I’m still a little unfamiliar with taking on other roles. But the nice thing is that I’m not being pressured into anything here either, the decision about when and which roles I accept is ultimately up to me alone.
Update: Over the years, I have actually been able to take on more and more responsibilities and am now known as the “Data Protection Officer (DPO)” and “Information Security Officer (ISO)” in the company. I was also able to contribute my expertise to the implementation of ISO 27001 (international standard for information security).
Would you re-apply to virtual7 today?
I would apply to virtual7 again today. Today, I wouldn’t look for a big company with thousands of employees. I don’t think I would feel comfortable in a large corporation. I really enjoy what I do now, which I wouldn’t have thought before. During my studies, I focused on other areas. Sure, I studied computer science and you have a wide range of options, but I never really enjoyed software development. I actually specialized in operating system kernels. The people you work with every day have to be compatible with each other in order to work effectively. virtual7 definitely has a good sense of this.
Is there a project or task that you are particularly proud of?
For me personally in internal IT, our relocations were something special. Especially the first one. That was an exciting experience. It required a lot of planning in advance. In particular, the servers had to be shut down properly without losing important data. During our last move, to Durlach, everything was organized much more professionally. For example, the first measures to make the move as easy as possible could be taken weeks beforehand in the empty office space. Five years earlier, things were very different. We did everything ourselves. From setting up the desks and cabinets to installing cable ducts and laying the cables, we did everything ourselves. Everyone pitched in and now we’re sitting in a beautiful new office complex with our own virtual7 sign outside. It’s really something special when you’ve seen all the small steps and successes beforehand.
How do you see future developments?
It would be very difficult for me without the Internet, so broadband expansion is very important to me. On vacation in Thailand, I sometimes have better Internet on islands than when I go into the forest here in Germany, which is not acceptable in a country like Germany. As far as administration is concerned, I would like to see more online options. You can now have your medication, weekly shopping and entire home furnishings delivered to your home, but I have to wait in a queue with others to have my ID card renewed. For a conversation that takes ten minutes. I also think it’s terrible that fax machines still exist. We know today that they are unsafe and yet so many are still used in all kinds of areas – especially when communicating with doctors. Yet dealing with the authorities should be easy – after all, we’ve seen recently that it can work when it has to. The potential to save time and money is definitely there.
