No matter how you know us – whether you’re a client, considering becoming a client, or interested in joining our team – there’s a lot about Ceeva you may not know.
That’s why we have created a series of spotlight posts about the people on the team. In this post, we sat down with Ashley Davis, who told us all about their favorite movies and places to go around Pittsburgh, and dropped some advice for those considering a career in managed IT support.
Are you ready to dive in and meet Ashley?
Hi, I’m Ashley Davis!
I’m the Creative Solutions Designer and also a Network Account Engineer at Ceeva.
The Creative Solutions Designer part is a fairly new title that I’m really excited about. Basically, when we onboard a new client who needs more assistance than our standard network account engineer scope, I come up with, well, a creative solution. It usually involves custom hardware and software builds to make their process and technology work better.
For example, one client of Ceeva’s might need a custom door security model, or other odds and ends. I’m pretty proficient at creating budget-friendly solutions to out-of-the-box problems.
For the Network Account Engineer title, that covers the more bread and butter elements of our local Pittsburgh managed IT services. I handle any network issues that come up with any of our clients, which can range from the low level networking issues to fixing servers, password resets, and more, depending on the client.
Anything that our clients need that involves custom tech, I handle.
I am going on five and a half years now. I just had my five-year anniversary, so that's pretty exciting.
Before I joined the Ceeva team, I had a similar position but it was on a much smaller scale. I’ve always had a background in IT; my dad ran his own electrician company. I was an electrician with him for many years.
At Ceeva, we're definitely always learning new things. Usually, it’s the same thing we already knew but different or slightly updated. Like with Microsoft 365, every few weeks something changes with it. For example, the Microsoft Teams app became much faster recently.
At Ceeva, we specialize in many of the same projects for our clients. Any big one-off project that I get to create a custom solution for is always fun. It’s fresh and I still love working with electronics, which I don't get to do as often.
Anytime I get to connect wires to tiny boxes, I’m happy.
That's a really good question. It's gotta be something along the lines of: Make sure you really do want to do this for a career. It's intense; you need to have a love for it.
This is off the beaten path, but right now my favorite is an older movie that I just recently watched, but since watching it I've been absolutely obsessed. It's called SLC Punk!. It’s about a couple of punk kids living in Salt Lake City, which is not a very punk city to be in. It's very funny, and emotionally wrenching.
It has Matthew Lillard, who is one of my favorite actors of all time. My favorite role of his is in Hackers.
Here’s a fun fact for you. At the end of the movie, there's a hacking showdown, where a group of kids infects this one server with viruses. During that scene, every single virus they mentioned is a real virus that has existed. And when they describe how to deal with it, the words they are using are correct. Obviously, what you see in the movies is all fantasy, but the stuff they talk about in that scene is all real.
I’m originally from Texas, but I’ve been in Pittsburgh for seven years now. If you’re visiting, you can’t beat Frick Park. There's so much there, and I love how pretty it is.
My other favorite is probably Kennywood Park, it’s an amusement park. You gotta love Kennywood.