BigPanda and Blackrock 3 Partners Honor Incident Commanders from Cardinal Health, Milestone Technologies, OneMain Financial and Sony PlayStation

Third Annual Award Program Powered by Peer Voting Recognizes Heroes for Ability to Respond to IT Inc

BigPanda, the leader in AIOps Event Correlation and Automation, and online incident management academy Blackrock 3 Partners, announced the winners of the 2022 Incident Commander Awards, a peer-voted award program honoring IT rockstars in support, ITOps, DevOps, SRE or in the NOC.

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Now in its third year, the Incident Commander program recognizes those who go above and beyond when it comes to IT incident response and handle high-impact global incidents with world-class professionalism and skill. This year’s Incident Commanders from Cardinal Health, Milestone Technologies, OneMain Financial and PlayStation have gone above and beyond to minimize the impact of outages for their organizations.

“We live in a time where people want to interact with digital services 24/7,” explained Cari Jaquet, VP of Marketing for BigPanda. “Everyone’s demand for uninterrupted access to banking, shopping, meetings, gaming, travel and other services puts tremendous pressure on incident commanders, critical members of IT Ops, DevOps, SRE and NOC teams,” she explained.

Big names including Spotify, Google Cloud, Atlassian, Coinbase and Southwest Airlines have all suffered major incidents this year, costing them revenue and hurting their reputations with customers. In fact, 91% of businesses say downtime costs can be $300,000 per hour, according to ITIC. Incident Commanders are the overworked heroes who keep these services running with minimal downtime.

“As organizations rely more and more on a multitude of apps and systems to power their businesses, the role of the Incident Commander has never been more important,” said Rob Schnepp, founding partner of Blackrock 3 and a longtime fire department Chief Officer and Incident Commander in the San Francisco Bay Area. “This year’s Incident Commander winners represent the best of the best, and we’re proud to recognize them for their talent and leadership.”

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BigPanda and Blackrock 3 Partners developed the Incident Commander award program to specifically acknowledge individuals who rise above the alerts and outages to perform their jobs like true Incident Commanders. Winners were nominated by their peers, 12 finalists were identified, and more than 1,000 votes were cast by the community on the four they felt were most deserving. Winners will receive a $1,500 gift card from Global Giving to donate to the charity of their choice, a 10-hour Incident Commander Blackrock 3 Partners course for five members of their team.

This year’s Incident Commanders are:

• Malcolm Lee Graves, major incident manager at Cardinal Health. For Malcolm, one of the secrets to surviving and thriving in a hectic industry is listening and using his time as if there is NO time. That attitude, along with a team that’s focused on the mission of resolving incidents ASAP, has resulted in his deserving Incident Commander win.
• Jack Habaibeh, senior solutions architect at Milestone Technologies. In his role, Jack demonstrates a strong ability to understand client, user and team needs, keeping them at the forefront during complex problem-solving. Jack advises aspiring incident commanders to keep learning new IT skills and knowledge, as well as to work on perfecting directive communication skills.
• John McDermott, incident commander at OneMain Financial. John’s Incident Commander win stems from his ability to bring a calm but commanding voice during the storms that are IT outages. Being in control and calm allows his primary support team to focus on identifying and resolving the issue, alleviating pressure across the rest of the team. In fact, John recognizes that the ability to keep calm even in the face of growing pressure is a valuable talent both at work and in everyday life.
• Chelsea Fontana, manager of incident and problem management at PlayStation. For Chelsea, effective communication and the ability to stay calm under pressure are two of the most valuable characteristics in IT incident management. She urges aspiring Incident Commanders to never stop learning and take every opportunity to broaden their knowledge and skills. Among the skills she’s most proud of is her ability to keep her sense of humor even through trying times.

BigPanda will host a winner’s circle event to honor this year’s Incident Commanders this fall.

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