Tony grew up in the small town of Eskridge Kansas.  Ever since he was little, he was always technically inclined.  When he was young he took apart anything he could get his hands on to see how it worked.  This is where he gained the nickname WonderNerd from one of the locals.

He started programming BASIC on an 8088 when his family got their first computer in 1989.  As he continued working with computers he taught himself several programming and markup languages including C++, SGML, and HTML.

While in college Tony continued his technical inclination by pursuing degrees in technology and business at Kansas State University (K-State).  He was also involved in the college’s chapter of ACM and served as a club officer for the organization.  

Tony graduated from K-State with degrees in Computer Systems Technology, Technology Management with a minor in business, Web Development Technology, and several other associates degrees.  He continued on at K-State where he completed course work for a Masters Certificate in Business Administration.

In March 2005 Tony started work at EAGLE Software in Salina Kansas.  His first task at Eagle was to figure out how to efficiently backup Virtual Machines from VMware ESX 2.0/2.5.  This was Tony’s first major exposure to virtualization.  From that time on he has been heavily involved in virtualization, installing hundreds of virtualized environments for many SMB’s as well as enterprise organizations.

In early 2012 Tony was named a Dell TechCenter Rockstar and in April of 2012 he received the honor of being designated a VMware vExpert.  He continues to hold the VMware vExpert recognition.

Tony joined VCE in late 2012 as a solutions architect specializing in end user computing (EUC) solutions.  While working as a solution architect he was instrumental in designing solutions for several Fortune 500 companies and many other well-known organizations.  He was also instrumental in creating new EUC and management products.  During his tenure at VCE it became one of the fastest growing technology companies ever.

In mid-2014 Tony joined EMC as a Sr.  Tech Marketing Manager.  In this role he helped develop and create collateral around EUC & EMC solutions.  He has also been active in several projects under development around EUC.

At VMworld 2015 Tony was part of the EMC EUC Solutions team that announced Federation End-User Computing.  This was the first solutions launch Tony had driven from concept to completion.  He considers this both one of his biggest successes and one of his biggest growth experiences, as the solution was terminated seven months after its announcement in favor of a different direction.

In 2016 Tony was named NVIDIA vGPU Community Advisors (NGCA), a program he is still an active member of today.  He was also part of the merger creating the largest privately controlled technology company in recorded history when Dell and EMC merged to become Dell Technologies.

Following the merger Tony moved to the Dell EMC Ready Solutions team.  As part of that team he worked on the Ready Bundle for Virtualization team, the Ready Systems for HPC team, and the Ready Systems for VDI team.  In June 2018, Tony returned to working on converged infrastructure as a tech marketing engineer for PowerOne.

In his spare time Tony is conjuring up new ideas that leverage GPU’s for things other than their intended uses.  Of late he has focused on mixed usage workloads and VDI by day, Compute by night.  

If you would like to find out more about Tony be sure to visit www.wondernerd.net or follow @wonder_nerd on twitter.