InterWorks’ very own Systems Engineer, Ideen Jahanshahi was named “The Best Veeam Engineer in the World, 2014” last month. The title sounds lofty, but it comes directly from Veeam themselves. What’s more is that he earned it by competing against several of the industry’s best in Veeam’s LAB WARZ at the VeeamON conference. The prize? The aforementioned title, a whopping check for $10,000 and bragging rights until next year’s conference.

Ideen was honored at the conference as well as on the official VeeamON 2014 conference page. Watch the video at the bottom of the page to see a post-competition interview with Ideen. 

The Inaugural VeeamON Conference

VeeamON was Veeam’s very first customer and partner conference centered entirely on improving the availability of applications and data. The conference took place from Oct. 6-8 and featured tons of breakout sessions and networking opportunities. People from around the world gathered to learn more about Veeam products, data center optimization and the latest industry trends. Veeam was joined by other technology giants like Microsoft, HP, Cisco and VMware. It just so happens that those same companies are also InterWorks partners.

The Competition: Veeam LAB WARZ

LAB WARZ was a major event at this year’s VeeamON conference. What was it? Essentially, the brightest Veeam engineers from around the world gathered to test their skills in a gauntlet of challenges created by Veeam themselves. The competition consisted of 12 scenarios over four levels:

1. Basic Configuration
2. Administration
3. Engineering
4. Architecture

Contestants were scored on how fast they completed scenarios and environments. These scenarios and levels were designed to test contestants on meeting on real-life customer needs using Veeam and VeeamOne in both VMware and Hyper-V environments. 200 people signed up for the competition with only 10-15 completing all 12 stages. Ideen coasted through all 12 scenarios and landed at the top spot, demonstrating exactly why he is “The Best Veeam Engineer in the World.”

Above: Ideen posing with his winnings from LAB WARZ.

The Secret to Winning

There’s actually no secret here. Ideen earned this award because he’s an intelligent and hard-working individual. He has spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of Veeam products. A big contributing factor is his varied experience implementing Veeam in IT environments across vastly diverse businesses. When you work for an IT and data consulting firm like InterWorks, you see a lot of different client needs and scenarios. This experience, combined with Ideen’s smarts and work ethic are what pushed him ahead of the competition.

All of us at InterWorks are proud of Ideen’s achievement, but we’re certainly not surprised. Winning this award is a prime example of the overarching InterWorks culture at work. Everyone at InterWorks strives to be the very best at what they do, which is why we’ve been successful as a company in delivering the best client solutions possible. With that type of mentality, our talented team members will continue to win honors like Ideen did at VeeamON.