My story: Why I’m excited to have my head in the clouds
May 5, 2021
Accenture’s ANZ Cloud First lead, Matt Coates, is a creative tech trouble maker who loves to push boundaries. That’s why he’s declared himself Accenture’s chief cloud head and is calling on like-minded people to join the Cloud First movement.
I grew up on a farm in Daylesford, Victoria. As the eldest of four, I was Dad’s best worker (self declared)… and was brought up doing the hard yards feeding the animals and other things before the school day started.
My dream job was to become an architect, designing dream houses… but my parents thought a more employable path would be to nudge me down a career in tech. I loved building computers and home networks at an early age. My Dad, siblings and I would play games games (Age of Empires was our favourite…) sitting up late at night, with everyone in different rooms on different computers.
I started out studying IT but soon switched to a five-year double degree in Commerce and Computing. I really loved the commerce side of things – especially law. A creative techy who loved legal stuff and was also an accountant.
I spent my third year (I was 19) in North Carolina in the US, studying and working for IBM at the Research Triangle Park – the Silicon Valley of the East Coast. It was pretty cool. More than 15,000 IBMers worked at the same complex. I was responsible for running ensuring VisualAge was a multi-language product and then the translation and test of the multi-language product.
I met my partner of 13 years while I was working in London for Accenture. He’s Norwegian but from Vietnamese heritage. A friend introduced us and I was intrigued. Six months later we moved in together.
We returned to Australia in 2017 (along with our two sausage dogs) – and I rejoined Accenture in 2020 to lead the newly created Cloud First group. It felt like coming home.
Over the next three years, we’re investing $3 billion globally in talent, building and scaling new businesses, acquiring others and welcoming them to the Accenture family and co-investing with our clients.
Why? Because today, every business is a digital business and heart of a digital business is a new architecture powered by cloud. Today, every company needs to dramatically accelerate their move to the cloud to become digital businesses that are flexible, low cost and resilient enough to survive and thrive in a world where there is only one constant – change.
That’s what excites me – the power to reimagine the world through the cloud.
Do you have your head in the cloud? We’re currently looking for people who live and breathe Cloud. Inventive, imaginative and optimistic people, whose heads are filled with the possibilities of Cloud technology, with the technical ability to make them happen. So don’t even think about settling for an ordinary Cloud career. Come reimagine what’s possible and fast-track your future with Accenture Cloud First. Click here to view all our great roles.
