About Me

Erik M. Cummings

Sr. Director of Cloud Systems Engineering, Oracle NetSuite

I’m hitting the best years of my life right now. Health is great, family is great, friends are fantastic, and both career and school are going well.

Yes, School.

I’m finishing my Bachelor of Arts online at Concordia University Texas. My college started out 15 years ago, after the U.S. Marine Corps and even after I had already started a successful IT Career. I didn’t finish. The experience and learnings from the Marine Corps, and my own self-driven learning and constant expansion, gave my career a boost, so when push-came-to-shove, I chose career and stopped schooling.

Now, I see my kids doing homework, and I realized one of the easiest ways to encourage them, was to encourage myself.

I started back into classes to show my children it’s OKAY, and even GOOD to do homework and learn. I wanted them to see me proud and happy to be learning. I wanted them to see me make the tradeoffs between play and classwork. I also wanted to finish something I started long ago.

Marketing and Journalism! Uh-Oh…

Who can’t use a little more knowledge and experience at marketing? At communicating in a way to increase the chances that people buy what you are selling? Whether it’s yourself, your own image, your product, your pet project at work, or just an idea, we can all use a little bit of help in this area – regardless of profession. We Technology People have generally always lacked in communication and marketing of ourselves. And having 20 years of experience in tech and business, having run annual budgets in excess of $50 million, I have already learned a lot of HR, general business, finance, and other areas – but Marketing…nope…not really. So it would be hard, it would force me to learn, it would put me outside my comfort zone. For these reasons, I chose this specialty.