The past week was a whirlwind for the team here at Rubrik. We’ve toured through Europe to chat with press (New Statesman Tech, Compare the Cloud, etc.), distributors, partners, and customers (such as Totaljobs Group Ltd) as part of our official EMEA launch event. The energy and excitement for Rubrik is palpable – alleviating the pain of legacy architecture and helping businesses embrace the next generation of converged data management to solve concrete problems that plague companies today.As Rubrik enters more data

As Rubrik enters more data centers across the globe, we felt the need to further empower our channel partners’ engineers from a technical perspective. While it’s certainly true that our solution is incredibly simple to deploy, consume, and scale (because of all the smarts baked into the fabric), engineers always want to pull back the covers and understand how any solution works at a deeper level. We agree. Knowledge is an asset when doing data center design against the functional design concepts – requirements, constraints, and assumptions – that are used to craft meaningful IT.

And so, I’d like to introduce the world to the Rubrik Master (RM) Certification program.

Rubrik Master is a project that my team is putting together to build a channel certification program that is actually worth consuming. It’s not a bait-and-switch program that forces folks to reach certain tiers by digesting marketing drivel (you’d be surprised how many vendors do this). It’s a half day, technical-focused course that is broken into segments:

  1. Conceptual Knowledge: the architecture and design used to build Rubrik.
  2. Practical Knowledge: how to instantiate, configure, and consume Rubrik.
  3. Automation and Orchestration: taking the platform further for private, public and hybrid cloud deployments that need self-service and workflows.
  4. Troubleshooting: a scenario-based approach to the pitfalls that beleaguer an enterprise data center.

“The Rubrik Master Certification gave me an in-depth view under the hood of [Rubrik’s] architecture” says Adri Zandee, Director of Technology at BigTec and participant of the first RM training course held in London. “It provides our BigTec channel partner champions with the perfect skills to demonstrate this unique approach that is converged data management.”

I couldn’t agree more – the room was filled with smart engineers who had sharp ideas of how to bring Converged Data Management to their customers. It was humbling to spend half a day teaching and chatting with skilled folks from rich, technical backgrounds in data protection and data center architecture.

Once the course has been completed, all that stands in an engineer’s way is a certification exam that Rubrik hosts on an internal platform. This means no expensive trips to a testing center and no wasted time booking travel. And, of course, there’s a fair bit of “swag carrots” to reward those who enter the dojo and survive. 🙂