SDN meets James Governor

Tuesday night I The Bloggers have landed… about how I was on my way down to Walldorf to speak with a blogger named James Governor. Well today is Friday and I’m back up in my lovely little, and a whole lot cooler, home office and I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what went on yesterday. A normal day for me is one that crosses the range of “cheating in the forums” to “points beggers” to new weblog applications, chatting with members to creating new forums, to writing blogs, etc. Very seldom do I have a single day with a very distinct focus. Wednesday was one of those days. Wednesday was my “Scripting Languages” day. My day started with a 5 o’clock wakeup and a drive into town for the train. While waiting for the train I had 4 phone calls, yes all before 6:30 in the morning from people in Asia asking various questions about Scripting. This was followed up by several emails on the topic as well. On the train I had a chance to sit back and do some programming myself – I’ve actually created an entire PHP/AJAX app to help me monitor all of you contributors out there and what you do each week in terms of points, t-shirts, sessions you give and of course prizes you earn. I arrived, of course late in Walldorf because for whatever reason the trains were once again late. Ran straight to my first meeting with the guys for Enterprise Search and Enterprise Search, Scripting is there BELIEVE ME! That was followed by a meeting with a brand new member to the Emerging Solutions group who has been brought on board for “Scripting Languages”, a definite step in the right direction! Later in the afternoon I also meet with someone from the ES Community who was asking me about “Scripting” as well. OK before that last meeting I had my meeting with James but since that was just a really great meeting I thought I’d mention it here at the end. You know save the best for last, and all that. Let me first give you a bit of background on James in way of his bio, which Stacy Fish from SAP provided me with.

James is Principal Analyst and founder of RedMonk. He leads coverage in the enterprise applications space, assisting clients with application development, integration middleware and systems management issues, as they relate to operational and business process optimization. Before RedMonk he spent three years at Illuminata, Inc., where he led both the Application Strategies and Enterprise Management practices at the firm. He worked with both vendor clients, to establish product development and marketing strategies, and as an advisor on IT strategy to user organizations and service providers. He joined Illuminata from InformationWeek UK, where he was deputy managing editor. Before InformationWeek he worked at Computing, the UK’s leading enterprise title. As a reporter, he specialized in systems management, application middleware, and legacy operating environments, working closely with IT managers and vendors to identify and break exclusive news stories. James has been an IBM and Microsoft corporate watcher for 8 years. He is regularly quoted in European press and US and has served as an industry expert for television and radio segments with media outlets like the BBC.”

So he’s not just some blogger whose about to write a few things on SAP related stuff – from his bio and from meeting him now in person I can say – he knows what the heck he’s doing and it was a really interesting conversation! What really threw me off to begin with though was his business card: Company Name, His name, Title, His Blog address How cool is that? OK back to the topics at hand, I kind of felt like that little fish in the sea, I mean I was meeting this guy who had spent his time so far speaking with VP’s, people in charge of whole divisions, heads of projects, etc. and here I am SDN blogger and Community Evangelist. We covered topics from how I got started with SAP technologies to SDN, to coming to work at SAP. We discussed how blogging is becomming the new way of finding out what someone knows. In fact, and I don’t think I mentioned this to James but during Sapphire Orlando two of our contributors mentioned how when they are looking for someone to work in their SAP development areas they “Google” them then “SDN” them, add that to the fact that this IS THE place for all SAP related technologies and it’s no wonder that some say “SAP Developer Network is Kicking ***“. A lot of our conversation revolved around “Scripting” but also about how SDN here is making a difference. I don’t want to go into too many details as I’d rather wait and have you read what he writes, so be sure to subscribe to his link and see what he has to say about all of you.