I’ve worked in IBM Collaboration Solutions / Lotus for more than 15 years. Next month I’ll start working for another team in IBM, called Emerging Technologies as a Bluemix advocate. I’m very excited and look forward to the new opportunity!
I’ve really enjoyed working for ICS / Lotus over the last years. I love collaborative and social technology where you can immediately see the value for customers. I also love app dev to help customers and partners to build their own apps and extend our products. ICS has given me the chance to work on these topics, e.g. Lotus Workflow, reinventing EMail, Notes, Composite Applications, XPages and Connections App Dev. The thing I enjoyed most in ICS though are the people. I had the pleasure to work with so many talented developers, tech leads and managers and nice people. The good thing nowadays is that social software helps to stay connected.
Earlier this year I didn’t go for re-election as an OpenNTF director since I didn’t have enough time. The five years I worked on OpenNTF and with our app dev community were amazing. When I suggested to support OpenNTF in 2008, IBM allowed me to work in this role which was something new for ICS at that time. Working with the community and the OpenNTF directors and contributors was a lot of fun. I especially enjoyed the five app dev contests which were a huge success. With the new directors coming in, I’m confident OpenNTF will continue to shine.
While I’ll start in the new team in November I’ll slowly transition out of the IBM Collaboration Solutions organization. There is an important app dev project I’m working on which I’ll finish and hopefully present at IBM ConnectED. I also want to continue to work with the ICS community and introduce them to and help them with Bluemix.
I’m very excited to start working on Bluemix. I’ve always liked rapid application development and deployment and see IBM’s Platform as a service (PaaS) offering as a great solution to build apps for the cloud. The ability to use so many available services, paired with auto-scaling, analytics, devops, standard development techniques and easy deployment is awesome. I think that PaaS is really the solution for customers and partners to implement their specific requirements and to extend and leverage other Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. PaaS allows the level of flexibility, innovation and customization that most SaaS services don’t provide.
In the new team I want to be more visible in the community again, so keep an eye on my blog and follow me on Twitter. There are many new things I want to learn, e.g. Watson, Internet of Things, node.js, and so on and I want to share my experience.
Looking forward to interesting times!