Splunk Unveils Sysadmin of the Year 2006

December 4, 2006; 09:26 AM

Splunk, creators of the search engine for logs and IT data, in conjunction with SourceForge.net, Digg, NaSPA (the Network and Systems Professionals Association), LOPSA (the League of Professional System Administrators), USENIX/SAGE, and Bawls Guarana, today announced that Michael Beck of Emerging Technology Group has won the grand prize 2006 Sysadmin of the Year (SAOTY) contest. He was chosen out of nearly five thousand nominations. Michael has been awarded a $2,500 Splunk professional license, a lifetime membership to NaSPA and a trip to Washington, D.C. to attend the LISA Conference, December 3-7, 2006. Michael will be honored with a presentation at LISA on December 6.

SAOTY is an annual contest, spearheaded by Splunk, providing business professionals with a way to recognize their company's network, system, database or application administrators. Winners of the awards were evaluated by a panel of representatives from the sponsoring organizations and other IT professionals.

"The Sysadmin of the Year Award brings attention to the work of system administrators and acknowledges outstanding achievements," said Patrick McGovern, vice president, community and services at Splunk. "Our panel of senior IT executives and acclaimed system administrators received roughly five thousand nominations from industries across the board. Winners were chosen on the merits of administrator responsibilities, workplace attitude, how far they went above and beyond the call of duty, and acknowledgment by peers as a valuable member of the team, company or organization."

Michael Beck is a system administrator for Emerging Technologies Group. Nominated by his supervisor as well as the president of Emerging Technologies Group, he exemplifies the traits of a model sysadmin with top-notch technical skills but also excels with people as a mentor, teacher and coworker. With eight years of experience, Michael has taken on a broad range of responsibilities at Emerging Technologies Group, above and beyond his job duties. He was described as a "go-getter" who doesn't have the word "no" in his vocabulary. He has been responsible for the complete build out of two office spaces that exceeded 100+ workstations, all related network infrastructure, security features, and general business equipment. With Michael's help, the company employees knew they could just "walk in and go to work." His technical knowledge is broad and his work ranges from network administration to email administration, to operations to managing voice communications and mobile devices. He is also responsible for building management and physical security of the Emerging Technologies Group offices.

"Michael understands a huge range of technologies and puts them together to meet business needs," said Tom Limoncelli, SAOTY judge, system administrator and author of The Practice of System and Network Administration. "Twice he's built out systems for new 100+ person offices with somewhat vague business requirements. Most business people have no idea how difficult this is, and such skills often go under-appreciated. Yet, that is how sysadmins usually operate. Michael is a 'soup to nuts' kind of sysadmin."

"It was a surprise and an honor that the president of the company worked with my direct supervisor to nominate me," said Sysadmin of the Year Michael Beck of Emerging Technologies Group. "I'm excited to have won the grand prize. It's not common that sysadmins are recognized for achievement. More often we're associated with IT frustration especially when something goes wrong. I really didn't do anything special. Like all administrators, I feel I'm just doing my job."

Additional SysAdmins Honored

Sean Thomas of True Prism Technologies demonstrated heroic, selfless acts as a sysadmin that led him to be the First Prize winner. In the fall of 2004, the offices of True Prism Technologies burned down when a fire started in an adjacent unit. With less than four minutes to evacuate the building, Sean was the last person to leave the building and rescued the RAID backup server on his way out -- all equipment and infrastructure was bolted down in the server room. As a technical team of one, Thomas set up the backup server and got business back up and running. Thomas has been awarded an Apple MacBook.

    Additional prize winners include:

    -- Runners-Up (3)
         (1) Darren Barry of the US Air Force
         (2) Micah Anderson of Eggplant Media Workers' Cooperative
         (3) Dawn Lovell of CenturyTel
    -- Honorable Mentions (5)
         (1) Mike Jennings of Rackspace
         (2) Nik Keating of Digital Forest
         (3) Russ Steffen of Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography
             Center (US Navy)
         (4) Denis Roy of Eclipse Foundation
         (5) Justin Hartwell of Yarn Lady

    All the winning nominations can be viewed at www.sysadminoftheyear.com.

System Administrators Go the Extra Mile for Companies Across Industries and Geographies

Nominations for the 2006 SAOTY award illustrated the broad range of skills and traits that make up great system administrators, often debunking the stereotypical characterization of a sysadmin. Many of the nominations highlighted the unflagging willingness of the administrator to go beyond their job description, work at any and all hours and on holidays, and their ability to find the answer to any problem. Many of the nominations spoke of passion and dedication to the work, and keen technical ability, including a strong uptime record, leading to saving the company money and/or time. In general these system administrators are admired for keeping business running smoothly.

IT departments across all industries, such as the military, government and city/county offices, technology, insurance, education, automotive, medical, and financial services, online services, web design, and telcom participated in the award program. A sample of companies includes: AOL, Blue Cross, State Farm, Charles Schwab, AMD, AT&T, Airforce, US Army, Fidelity Investments, IBM, Intel, Lucasfilm Animation, Mozilla, Red Hat, PayPal, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Time Warner, T-Mobile, US House of Representatives, Verizon, Yahoo, and Yellowpages.

About SysAdmin of the Year

SAOTY is a contest inviting business professionals to nominate their company's system administrator to receive recognition and prizes for their outstanding achievements. Any network, system, database or application administrator can be nominated. Nominators are required to submit an online nomination entry form summarizing why they believe the nominee deserves the honor of being named the Sysadmin of the Year. Submissions are judged by a panel consisting of representatives from the sponsoring organizations and other IT professionals. The contest is open to U.S. and Canadian resident IT administrators currently employed as an IT administrator.

About Splunk

Splunk is the search engine for logs and IT data. It's software that indexes, manages and enables you to search logs and IT data from any application, server or network device in real time. Splunk is easy to download, install and use and it's very powerful. Enterprises, government organizations and more than 75,000 users are achieving higher availability, meeting compliance requirements and cutting IT costs with Splunk. Based in San Francisco, Splunk is a private company funded by August Capital, JK&B Capital and Sevin Rosen Funds. Check us out at www.splunk.com .