Thrive Employee Spotlight: Michael Conte, Solutions Architect

Welcome back to another installment of our “Thrive Employee Spotlight” blog series.

Our featured Thrive Employee is Michael Conte. Michael is a Solutions Architect at Thrive.

Michael is the technical lead for the Thrive sales team out of our New York office. He works lockstep with the sales team on solving business issues for clients and prospects with Thrive’s NextGen technology portfolio.

You’ll usually find Michael talking with our customers, including, CTOs, CIOs, and Director of ITs, to identify areas to improve or enhance their business operations leveraging Thrive’s innovative Cloud, Network Management, Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity technology services.

Michael recently moved from Jersey City to his home state of Rhode Island and is thrilled to be closer to his family and lifelong friends. In his free time, you’ll usually find Michael outdoors or on the river. He enjoys cycling, river rafting and paintball with his buddies. Look out – Michael and his friends have been paintballing for 13 years and you don’t want to get caught in their crosshairs!

Hi Michael! Can you tell us about your background and how you came to Thrive? 

Before coming to Thrive, I held engineering roles at Atrion, a Rhode Island managed services provider. I started as an Associate Engineer, and then moved up the ranks to Network Engineer and then Security Engineer. Along the way, I completed multiple Cisco certifications and oversaw the deployment of security-related technology and tools. 

Where did you go to school or get training?

I earned an Associate’s degree at New England Tech for computer networking, but made tech headlines in high school with Warwick Area Career and Tech Center. I represented Rhode Island in a national competition called Skills USA, which was related to Cisco internetworking. Recently, I was added to that program’s advisory board to help improve the courses.

What do you most enjoy about working for Thrive?

The opportunities for recognition and growth at Thrive are things I’ve never experienced before. IT is often a thankless job. If it works, nobody complains. When it doesn’t work, it’s not so great. However, the Thrive culture makes you feel valued with an emphasis on teamwork, recognition and positivity. We are a tight-knit group and that has advantages when working together on projects and in high-pressure situations. As a team, we know our strengths, weaknesses, and expectations when working closely together. That is a huge benefit for our company and our customers.

Any recent exciting projects at Thrive that you can tell us about?

ServiceNow has been wildly successful and is having a positive impact on businesses. It’s exciting to see how the platform helps modernize processes within the IT organization for our customers. I’m also working more on automating our sales process internally so I’m able to spend more time with prospects and customers and drive revenue.

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