“You have been mentioned in a Blog“.

What? Why would someone talk about me in a blog?

That was my reaction when I saw that Raffael Herrmann mentioned me in his “BIF” (not the one from Back to the Future, but BIF as in “Blog it forward”) article. I did not know about this but found it quite cool: get to know more about people that inspire you! And it’s better than the Ice Bucket Challenge.

So after reading through some more details, I realised there was no way out of this, so here I am! 🙂

About me

Born in Joigny, France, on a beautiful 24th of April (as far as I remember).

I studied in Dijon (BTEC Higher National Diploma) and Paris (Master’s Degree in Engineering), worked 3-4 years in Paris, 6 months in Cambridge (UK), a year in Marseille, and moved to Mannheim, Germany in 2005.

I thought a Map would help to understand it. It doesn’t, but still here it is:

In the last years, my employers were Calendra, Caisse d’Epargne, BMC Software, Oracle, Apigee/Google and lately SAP.

I have mainly been doing pre-sales for topics such as Identity and Access Management, Middleware and Integration – from worldwide engagements to local ones.

And since 2012 we are living in Lorsch, a nice little town between Frankfurt and Walldorf.

If you are into history, Lorsch is pretty interesting: a 8th century building in excellent condition (UNESCO monument) and especially a village reconstruction from the 10th century – perfect to get rid of your phone for the time of a visit!

Fun fact

With a dutch wife, being french and living in Germany, our kids sometimes get confused on what language to talk. And Esperanto is not a solution 🙂

Questions I got asked…

How do you select which topic you invest time in / what you want to learn (at a time when there are new frameworks, programming languages and techniques every day)?

There are 2 ways I select topics: from customer-demand and from what I see gaining traction in my news-feed.

As a Presales I bring value to the table by helping customers understand our products in their project context. Hence I need and like to drill-down into the details of what customers are asking me. For instance, hybrid Integration and API Management are 2 hot topics right now so this is were I invest most of my time.

On the other hand, when I read interesting articles in my news-feed, I start digging into them. For instance I read about the Digital Integration Hub topic – which I found very compelling for explaining integration to my customers better.

If you were given by your work a full day every week to do whatever you feel like, what would it be?

I would do multiple, different things every single day: mountain-biking, gardening, activities with the kids (swimming, climbing, playing board games, …). Maybe I would also simply start to do what I have been thinking of since years: learning Paragliding. However, that takes a lot of time so for the time being it’s not really compatible with family-activities.

Name the person who affected you most in your career/ way of thinking and why?

Many persons affected my career and my way of thinking: I took over habits from elder colleagues to stay calm in any situation. I learned from my managers to not take things personally if my employer is being bashed in a meeting. I’ve seen friends “climb up the ladder” up to very high ranked positions, to eventually understand that I like what I am doing and I do not need more responsibility, power, money to be happy.

(optional) Recommend resources of information that helped you in your work

Helping in my work on a day-to-day basis are:

• Heise.de
• Handelsblatt
• FAZ
• Golem
• TechCrunch
• Our internal Portal/Jam Site
• ComputerWoche
• Wired
• Google Discovery
• …

Not to forget: face-to-face discussions with my colleagues!

Next ones…

When I started working at SAP, I was impressed by her level of knowledge and her ability to present things in a simple manner. Also, not easy to move from beautiful Kerala, in India, to the cold and culturally so different Baden-Würtemberg :-). So I would like to forward this “BIF” to Divya Mary

The second person I would like to invite writing something about himself is Florian Wahl. I met him just a couple of years ago but we got along very well, sharing same interests and ideas.

My personal questions to them would be: what was your biggest moment in life, personally and/or professionally speaking?

Happy biffing!