Partner Highlight: An Interview with OpsGuru Partner Mency Woo
By Amy Khokhar
VANCOUVER, BC, Women in Tech World is delighted to celebrate our newest partnership with OpsGuru to support and advance women in tech. OpsGuru is a global engineering and consulting group specialising in container ecosystems, data processing and analytics, and cloud-native technologies.
To celebrate International Women’s Week, we sat down (virtually!) with OpsGuru Partner Mency Woo to learn more about her experience and background working in tech.
Mency Woo is a problem solver. She describes how early on in her undergraduate degree, she helped build the control system for a laser cutting machine used in car manufacturing. “It was an exhilarating experience to be involved in end-to-end development. The hands-on problem solving was what made me dedicated to the tech industry ever since.” And so began her career using tech to solve problems.
Fast forward to present day, Mency Woo is a Senior Partner at OpsGuru. A growing consulting firm based in Vancouver, BC, OpsGuru specializes in providing different multi-cloud solutions like Cloud Adoption, Application Modernization, Kubernetes Enablement, Cloud Security and Data Insights to their clients worldwide. They partner with the big cloud giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to provide effective solutions to fuel their client’s growth.
A continuous learner, Mency has carved out a career specializing in cloud infrastructure. An early player in the cloud computing movement, she witnessed the advent of the cloud back in 2010. While she attributes her early experiences to luck, - “I guess I have been very lucky in my experience, having been exposed to cloud infrastructure fairly early on around 2010” - we think that it’s Mency’s ability to make learning fun that has contributed to her successful career. That and her strong understanding of the complexities and nuances of integrating cloud technologies into traditional industries like healthcare.
“The benefit of the cloud is no longer argued; to integrate cloud into healthcare solutions, the key challenge is to assess, minimize and mitigate risks. To fully integrate an existing healthcare solution to the public cloud is certainly a daunting task. However, the scope is often much more manageable by unpacking the problem through classifying data (PII/PHI or not) and identifying subsystems within the full workflow and how data is processed and transferred.”
Having been an early adopter in one of the greatest transformations in technology (cloud computing) since the popularization of the internet (which Mency tells us is before her days!), Mency envisions that the democratization of AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning) will be the next big shift in tech. She believes that with the availability of tremendous amounts of data, smart tools, and libraries, entities will be able to leverage the decision-making role of AI/ML for efficient workflows. “We have been hearing about AI/ML and its potential for a number of years, but until very recently, the entry barrier to harness AI/ML has been so high that it has been accessible to only a very limited number of organizations.” And while this is exciting and not far off, Mency adds a note of caution. “While technology advances have always been about maximising efficiency, the difference of the AI/ML democratization from previous waves of changes is the necessary discourse on ethics, in the bias and explainability of AI and algorithms and understanding the impact.” Some of these conversations are already happening.
Continuing to look ahead but on a more personal level, Mency is excited about what the future will bring to her career. She loves exploring new territories and learning new technologies and is hoping she will be able to help support others in their careers, similar to the way she has been encouraged through her own by mentors and colleagues.
As for her advice for those who are curious about following in her footsteps and wanting to pursue tech roles, she leaves us with this:
“Just go and do it - and don’t forget to have fun while doing it. While failure hurts, it hurts even worse when you regret that you have not tried!”