About six months ago, I left my former employer for a new opportunity. That opportunity was a chance to run projects at Borders Group (the corporate headquarters of Borders Bookstores). It started as a more laid back role than I have held in a while; a chance to run some projects and not have any direct reports.

It didn’t take long for the pace to pick up. I quickly found myself running a few large projects along with a few small ones. I really enjoyed myself helping an organization that was not following standard process get going - putting some sanity around some chaotic past.

A few weeks back I was presented with an opportunity to run the data center at Borders. I was the Director of Data Center Operations at MarketWatch/Dow Jones and left there in 2005 to head back to my home state of Michigan. I was thrilled to get this opportunity at Borders since I enjoyed the challenges at MarketWatch so much.

There are a lot of differences between the data centers. Borders has an on-site data center running a large variety of business processes as well has a variety of platforms (mainframe, AIX, Intel, and more…). MarketWatch involved managing remote lights-out data centers in AT&T hosted environments.

Adding to the excitement is the fact that we are launching our new website which will run out of the data center in April. It is our separation from Amazon which has fulfilled online orders for years. We will do this on our own starting in April!

I am glad to be back in the data center world. I feel comfortable - sort of like the feeling you get when visiting a familiar place or reuniting with a great friend. Wish me luck!