Clark LaForge

Yardi

By Leah Etling on Sep 11, 2012 in People

Perhaps there’s something innately special about people named Clark that lends naturally toward a life of duality, not to mention innate problem-solving aptitude. Clark Kent, as we all know, was actually Superman. Yardi Systems Application Service Provider Specialist Clark LaForge also has an impressive out-of-work alter ego.

While he does most of his crime fighting on the clock, keeping Yardi’s hosted clients up to current protocols, secure and perfectly load balanced, here are a few things that make Clark a particularly interesting member of the Yardi IT staff.

-He was on the football field at Memorial Coliseum in Berkeley, Calif., during The Play, the famous Berkeley vs. Stanford band + gridiron mosh pit that was Cal’s five-leg lateral upset win over the Cardinal in 1982. What was a high school student from nearby El Cerrito doing on the field with the Cal band during the game? It was Clark’s job to make sure the marching band Bears stayed hydrated during the game.

-Despite launching his own music career as a clarinet player, with talent that sent him to Europe with a teenage traveling wind symphony, he decided bass drum was his second favorite instrument, and ended up being named to the prestigious Cal State Honor Band as a drummer. That landed him back on the field at Memorial Coliseum, where the UC Berkeley band leader, charged with instructing the high school students, was perplexed as to why the bass drummer didn’t have exacting technical skill.

-Even though he played classical music and show tunes in band, out of school Clark was listening to NWA, Ice-T and Too Short .. and DJ-ing with their beats, when he wasn’t on the floor busting out 80’s moves like the Smurf. Fast forward two decades and change, and Clark’s still dancing hip hop. He takes several classes a week in Goleta, loving the cardio workout he gets from working up a sweat to those now classic raps. He also helps his dance teachers out with graphic design and photography work for their classes and performances.

-A world traveler, Clark can give you fantastic travel tips. One of his favorite adventures was visiting Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, with its amazing 12^th century Hindu temples. In India, he’d recommend taking a boat trip in the Kerala region of southern India, where the Kerala Backwaters are a beautiful place to tour in a private boat.

-You might guess that an IT professional would have studied something fairly tech-y in college. Clark’s major at UCSB was actually religious studies, focusing on Eastern religion. He caught the bug for computing before college on trips to places like the Lawrence Hall of Science, and later had many summer jobs that fostered his technical skills. He even landed a UCSB gig in the admissions office that had an unusual perk – preferred parking for college graduation – a coveted thing if you’ve ever had to navigate the overflow crowds of family and friends in Isla Vista in June.

Never one to stop learning, Clark and the ASP team stay up to date on the latest developments in IT in order to deliver the highest caliber service for Yardi clients. Most recently, the project at hand has been to successfully migrate new clients to hosting on Yardi Orion for SharePoint, Yardi’s popular new platform for business management and intelligence. Learning the best practices for handling these mass data migrations, and mastering the Windows PowerShell scripting language, has been ASP’s recent focus.

“We’re using the knowledge we have from over 20 years of hosting Yardi clients, and building on that experience and skill,” Clark said of his team. “Transferring that into the SharePoint realm is exciting and new.”

Of course, given everything we just learned about Clark, exciting and new sounds like just another day at the office.  Need to figure out how to load balance SharePoint’s reporting services for a second web front end? No problem. This looks like a job for .. Clark LaForge!

*We jest, but this was in fact a recent technical troubleshooting problem that Clark recently tackled successfully. No capes or telephone booths were involved.

**We think.