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.