Focused and motivated, Preston Gallwas has worked with a wide array of technology with over 15 years of experience in servers, virtualization, and networking technology. Over the years he developed an interest in Citrix’ NetScaler and XenDesktop. Eager to learn ready to tackle any problem he has specialized his skills within the Citrix portfolio and is fluent with XenApp, XenDesktop, NetScaler, XenMobile, ShareFile, Provisioning Services and a host of other supporting technologies.
Preston moved into a consulting role in 2014, where he led a number of high-profile projects across many industries including healthcare, pharmaceutical, telecommunications, insurance and education. In addition to several very large scale deployments of over 10,000 seats, Preston has earned high level certifications in networking, virtualization, and mobility from Citrix. In 2019, Preston moved from the United States of America to New Zealand to work with Inde, a Citrix Partner based in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Preston has been active in the Citrix community for years and is a top contributor in #Citrix on IRC as well as being active on various forums.
Community Efforts
Having grown up with technology at hand, Preston was active in online discussions at a young age. Preston began online in varying degrees as early as 1994 and was an active participant in early internet culture, including chat rooms and actively learning code to develop “Personal home pages” while in grade school. As he grew, Preston was quite active in online forums for internet gaming and was quite comfortable socializing online.
In the professional world, Preston began actively participating in forums and online discussions early in his IT career to lean on the knowledge of others in order to problem solve and develop deeper understanding of the technologies he was working with. Starting with Novell NetWare at the Puyallup School District, Preston participated in forums, newsgroups, and contributed solutions back to the Novell user community. In later years, Preston started the “UnNetwork” blog to share some code snippets and other experiences and musings centered around IT.
In 2011, Preston’s Citrix XenDesktop pilot program with the Puyallup School District was gaining steam and his need for rapid answers to questions led him to #Citrix on IRC (IRC being one of his preferred social platforms from gaming platforms in years past, it was a natural fit! It is also where he began using the online handle Atum in 1999 on the multiplayer gaming service “Mplayer” and later IRC). The community members in the chat channel helped him through various technical issues and that collaboration proved invaluable. Expanding on this professional collaboration, Preston decided to adopt the name as his official online handle for his IT-related contributions, becoming a permanent fixture in #Citrix as |Atum|, renaming his twitter account to AtumVirt (Atum was taken, after all, and the topics centered around app/desktop/server virtualization at the time), and migrating the UnNetwork blogspot content to the newly minted www.atumvirt.com.
Since those earlier days, Preston has become an active contributor in a variety of forums and conferences, helping individuals from all over the globe solve issues related to their deployments whenever he is able. Preston’s enthusiasm for community engagement and contributions have earned him membership among the Citrix Technology Advocates, a group recognized by Citrix for their community contributions.
Preston can be found on LinkedIn, Twitter, reached via the AtumVirt contact form, Citrix Discussions, Reddit and of course as |Atum| in the IRC channel #Citrix.
