Doing business with Bede Hackney of Nimble Storage

The managing director of ANZ Nimble Storage started his ICT career as a mainframe operator.

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Title: Bede Hackney, managing director, ANZ, Nimble Storage

Twitter handle: @BKCH

How long have you been in your current role? 48 days

What business technology issue is your role focusing on?

Driving disruption in the ANZ storage market. Nimble Storage's founders recognised early on that the advent of flash storage and the emergence of the cloud represented an opportunity to drive significant change in this market. Our technology is helping customers reduce their data centre footprint, deliver a new level of application performance and resilience whilst at the same time reducing opex and capex - my role is to help customers in the Australian and New Zealand markets recognise these benefits.

Read, listen, ask why, ask why not, be curious and learn.

What are your interests away from work?

Life is hectic! I have four beautiful children, Grace, Jonas, Spencer and Reuben aged between 7 to 13 and my amazing wife, Kellie, is also in the industry (leading the Kaseya business across Asia Pacific and Japan). Outside of family, I try to keep fit – working to squeeze running, oztag and the gym into spare moments when I can….and (worst of all this season) I’m a tragic Penrith Panthers fan.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

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My dad must have told me a thousand times: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well”. I think Dad was usually referring to cleaning up my bedroom or doing my homework but I try to carry that into business, where delivering quality outcomes in everything you do is critical. That said; I think the inverse of Dad’s advice is also true, especially in these days of doing more with less, where I think it’s equally important to remember that if it’s not worth doing; don’t do it!

Professionally, who do you admire most?

Interestingly, this is the hardest question you’ve asked – it would be easy to take the clichéd route and nominate one of the headline innovators in our industry or the like but the truth for me is much closer to home. Throughout my career I’ve been absolutely blessed to work for some of the best leaders and mentors I could possibly have asked for. If I had to pick one person I really couldn’t, it would be something of a composite of all the managers I’ve worked for – proof I guess of how important good managers and leaders are!!

How long have you been working in your field?

I’ve been in IT since 1993 – I started as a mainframe operator!

How did you get into your role?

I was approached about the opportunity at Nimble Storage when I’d only been with VMware for about a year and I really wasn’t looking to explore external opportunities, but Nimble is such as a dynamic company doing so many exciting things – both technically and commercially– that it was really too good an opportunity not to join the team and I’m very excited to be here.

If you weren't working in your field, what would you be doing?

CEO of the [ rugby league football team] Penrith Panthers?! I think I’d have to leave coaching to Ivan Cleary but I wouldn’t mind tackling the business side of the Panthers!

Can you share one key pointer for keeping abreast of business technology trends?

I don’t think I have any earth-shattering secrets to share – read, listen, ask why, ask why not, be curious and learn. Following companies and leaders on Twitter is certainly a shortcut!

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