Remon Amboy

Yardi

By Leah Etling on Oct 15, 2012 in People

Remon Amboy isn’t just committed to his work at Yardi as Director of ASP – he has shed blood for the company. Repeatedly.

A 23-year-employee in Santa Barbara, Remon began his Yardi career as a part-time temp who answered phones for his first few months (he was also attending school at the University of California at Santa Barbara at the time). Fast forward two decades, and he’s now in charge of 10,000 devices, has helped Yardi open 12 data centers around the world and oversees 70 employees.

Those data centers, though, can be a little dangerous. That’s where Remon has managed to cut himself while racking servers and completing other equipment set-up tasks, quickly dashing off to the first aid kit to keep his blood off any equipment. Who knew IT had a sharp side?

A native of the Philippines who moved to the U.S. as a teen and attended high school in the Bay Area, Remon’s philosophy of work is simple but smart: Do the job at hand, and do it well, and other opportunities will likely follow.

“The formula in this company for success was for me, and for others as well, do the job that you’re doing and do it well. If you prove yourself to this company, opportunity will be there. Do your job well, and do it efficiently and good things will happen,” he said. He jokes that he earned a master’s and PhD at Yardi University. At UCSB, he earned his bachelor’s degree in political science.

Creating opportunity has worked well for Remon at Yardi Systems. His first official job here was in the now-phased out MLS department, where he helped create regular real estate listing digests for regional MLS’. Pre-photo scanners, the work was repetitive and involved pasting hundreds of photos of homes and land into binders each week so they could be printed and distributed.

Next he became the print shop supervisor for MLS, and then moved into tech support, followed by development and QA. Eleven years ago, he was part of the team that founded the Yardi IT department. So was Senior Vice President Scott Wiener, who oversees IT and has been with the company 24 years.

Amboy speaks very fondly of the close-knit team he works with and their strong skill sets, personalities and aptitudes.

“We’re a small team. We should be double the size, but it’s so hard to find people out there who fit with our team. We’ve been very selective about team members and most of our team has been here at least five years,” he told us.

The IT department is now responsible for maintaining a dozen data centers and workplaces for Yardi’s 2,500-plus employees, as well as storing client data that’s part of Yardi’s Cloud Services and Software as a Service offerings. IT professionals at Yardi must work across global time zones to serve data and offices worldwide.

A mountain biker who enjoys playing and watching tennis, staying healthy, travel and spending time with his wife and three kids, Remon once thought his life’s work would be practicing law. He’s not at all sorry about the different direction a part-time job took his career – but sometimes he looks back, incredulous

“I never thought that I would be a director in IT,” he told us, clearly grateful at the place his unexpected path – and hard work – has brought him.