Meet the Team – David Poultney

Welcome back to another meet the team interview! This time we are joined by David Poultney, a technical accounts manager with CIS. His job in a nutshell is to look after customers and contracts and to help small problems from becoming bigger ones.

On an average day, David spends his time speaking to customers, looking at purchases and progressing IT projects. Apart from working from home, his day has pretty much stayed the same since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic! He mentions the use of platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams as one difference now, using these for meetings with clients and colleagues alike rather than the usual face-to-face meetings.

David has been with CIS for around 7 years now. He comes from South Wales (you may be able to tell by his accent!) and he was a lifeguard as a teenager (how he met his wife!). He then went to college and worked in London for a while. He used to work for an educational IT reseller but was enticed to CIS by the technical side of the job. He started off as a support consultant with CIS in 2011, when the company was much smaller.

The best part about working at CIS for David is the team of people. In his words – “we naturally party!”. There’s always a good atmosphere in the office and it’s a fun place to work. Last year, David achieved his Certified Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP) qualification and he’s also achieved architect standard in a number of Sophos products, which he is proud of. He says he’s also very lucky to work with great customers such as St Paul’s Cathedral in London, all the way to formula 1 teams! He likes that no two days are the same. He does miss seeing his customers face-to-face at the moment but is glad he can keep in touch via online platforms.

Having mentioned the great atmosphere in the office, we asked David about how the team is keeping morale up at the moment when they’re all at home. He says they’re having a weekly zoom quiz with prizes which everyone is really enjoying!

David feels like CIS was very prepared for the lockdown back in March and was glad there was a “dry run” at CIS before it was formally imposed. However, working from home wasn’t a totally new thing for David – he only lives about 800 yards from the office so working from home was very easy, though he liked having his set up in the office. He thinks working from home is going to become the new norm after lockdown is eased, especially now people have realised that they CAN work from home and still be productive – this will make lots of big companies more flexible, reduce the overheads for them etc. Either way, it’s going to look a bit different!

Thanks for doing this interview David, and we’ll leave you to enjoy your PlayStation room!

You can watch the video below: