Andreas lives in Asker with his wife and their two children. Outside work, he spends almost all his time on activities with and without the children as he is both a coach and sports director at Holmen IF cross-country skiing club. Andreas enjoys running, skiing and hiking. He himself believes that people think he’s a sports fanatic.
Can you tell us a little bit about your job at Embriq?
I work as a sales director, and that means that I am responsible for all sales and business development in IT Managed Services. I haven’t been here for very long, so far I’ve been spending my time familiarising myself with the services we provide and the lovely people that work in the company. My role at Embriq will be to put in place a structure for how we approach the market and sell our services. What I think is exciting about Embriq is the position we have in the market as a one-stop shop for our customers as well as a service integrator. Especially being a service integrator which is independent of where the actual solution is located – whether it be the client’s own data centre, Embriq’s data centre or a public cloud solution.
Why did you choose Embriq?
I have known Embriq almost from the start, and I worked with Embriq as a customer some years ago when I was at Microsoft. At Embriq, I am very close to service provision and strategy which I really like. I believe that Embriq has a very exciting history, and what appealed to me was the experience they have in IT operations and management of business-critical and socially critical solutions. In combination with the new cloud world and services that are emerging there, this is a very exciting place to be. The background Embriq has as a company in understanding how important it is that solutions have to work 24/7, 365 days a year, is extremely important to have in this modern world. I’m looking forward to making my mark on strategy and helping to consolidate the growth we have planned for the next few years. In order to accelerate growth in the way we want, we have to do things a bit differently. So I’m looking forward to developing strategy and the organisation further and finding out how we can best utilise all the talented people who work at Embriq.
What do you think is the coolest technology trend at the moment?
I think that’s difficult to answer, but I’m fascinated with the developments in big data. Being able to find entirely new links that no one had any idea about I think is great. By combining this with AI, there is a great deal that can be achieved in this area, and we have already seen much of it in the consumer sphere. If we think about the enormous volumes of data that are out there and used for commercial purposes, I think we can create completely new business opportunities, but there are also many ethical challenges associated with it that have to be taken into account.
What is your favourite gadget?
Like so many others, I have to be honest and boring and say that it’s my mobile. Sometimes I feel a bit old because I’ve stopped getting involved with the ‘latest and greatest’. My mobile is simple because it develops day by day and gets new updates week by week. It’s perhaps the one device we can’t do without.
What is the best book you have read?
I haven’t read must fiction recently, but I really enjoy reading biographies. I can’t think of a specific book, but it’s often something about sport.
Do you have a favourite television series that you would recommend to others?
I don’t watch many television series, but much more sport and news. But a series that I really liked and as someone who played basketball when I was younger is the documentary about Michael Jordan – The Last Dance. I can really recommend this to anyone who was young in the 1980s and 90s.