The short story:
I will join Dutch Open Projects, DOP.nu. A 20 person PHP shop that offers SugarCRM, Joomla!, Symphony, Zend … and Drupal in the Netherlands!

The long story:
I started working in 1996 at PinkElephant, a student founded IT company in the Netherlands, hence the name. My first job was as a contractor to help out at one of the Global Network Management Centre’s of AT&T in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I think my first GNU/Linux slackware installs date back from that time. I learned a lot about Unixes, Cisco’s IOS, TCP/IP and managing firewalls. Remember that back in the mid 90-ies, the concept of "firewalls" was still catching on, it was for sure not a widespread best practice. I even remembered a funny trick back then, SGI (for the youngsters, think a hip machine like a Mac) was still a widespread used Unix and running many websites. You could use telnet (yes, unencrypted telnet!) towards such a box and login as the line printer daemon (lpt) that had default no password and a shell! All you had to do was use your favorite search engine, atltavista back in those days, and "google" for "powered by SGI" and you were in.

After my contract at AT&T, I worked internally at Pink’s emerging internet division. However, there was not much internet there, mostly managing Novell boxes. I disliked office automation in general and Novell in particularly so while I liked the young creative people, I went over to UniSource somewhere around 1998. Unisource was part of KPN. KPN just made the shift of a governmental owned telecom provider that had a monopoly on landlines towards a "commercial" company and UniSource was the datacommunication’s department. We managed dial in connections for nearly all ISP’s, managed the backbone of the Internet in the Netherlands. Like all providers UniSource was building a new network and when we rolled the network out, AS21286 was the fastest internetwork cloud in the world, using Packet over Sonnet with 2.5 Gbs per second in the core over Cisco 12016’s. Such a record was in those days beaten in a week, since everybody was rolling out "the new network". While I was in the networking team, the Unix team was only 5 meters away and I learned a lot about for example scaling transparent proxy’s as well.

Around 2000 I rejoined PinkElephant again, now part of Roccade and called PinkRoccade. I designed the new Internet infrastructure for them and was project lead for implementing it. I created a new AS and made the internet connections resilient via BGP4 and two independent upstream providers. After implementing this, my chief was smart enough to make me the manager of the network group and the Unix group. While I started managing the groups existed of only a dozen people, one year later I managed 30 people. During this time, around 2000/2001 I played around with PHPnuke and very soon after I stopped using that spaghetti code, I came across the drop.org website. Ever since that moment, I am more or less "active" in the Drupal community as a non coder. I had several functions after that moment, lead architect for a huge (20k plus seats) Server Based Computing environment, overpaid Business Consultant, speaker and for example active in (pre)sales. And during all these functions, I kept aligned to Drupal but never did anything with it professionally. I tried multiple times to introduce Drupal in my company and some customers. But the timing was wrong and the tool didn’t fit my employer at that time, who is one of the biggest Microsoft implementers in the world.

A year or so ago, I was fed up with my employer. I will not go in to details about why I wanted to leave the company since that would be very unprofessional but two things were most important and I would like to point out. PinkRoccade was bought by Getronics and Getronics lacks any kind of vision; the people in charge are basically there because of a bet gone wrong I presume since they must have been one of the most empty heads I ever met. I like to think / act that all people I meet are smarter then me but that was not the case at all when I spend some time at the headquarters of Getronics. The other reason is that the lack of vision of Getronics shows most when it comes to the IT; they focus completely on Office Automation, the desktop and hence on Microsoft products. In a world that is changing to services instead of clients, de jeure standards in stead of de facto standards and open instead of close, a wrong vision were I don’t want o be part of anymore. Luckily my network (see linkedin is after more then a decade in ICT with lots of contacts with customers and vendors good and –not to brag- I get a call from a headhunter every week or so. So when a small company that is implementing exclusively Open Source solutions came across my path, I decided to go there; I am joining Dutch Open Projects (dop.nu)! Nu btw is "now" in Dutch so it was a popular TLD some years ago in the Netherlands.

DOP is a 20+ person company, specialized in PHP. We do frontend (Joomla!, Drupal), midoffice (Drupal, Zend) and backend (SugarCRM, Symphony) implementations. I will be evangelizing Drupal for customers, working on sales, doing consultancy and leading projects. And hopefully, have a good time.

I always worked for employers with a couple of thousands employees, PinkElephant 1.500, PinkRoccade 10k, Getronics-PinkRoccade 20k and now Getronics-PinkRoccade is part of KPN that has some 30k employees. I am really looking forward to working over at DOP with only 20 people. No more making business plans in powerpoint (we use OO.org and don’t plan that way) but doing and making business in a more agile.

Now –after some 6 or 7 years of helping the community- it will sure be different to make money with Drupal. I hope that I will be able to keep the same independent attitude I had in the past as a Permanent Member of the Drupal Association. Please correct me anytime in the future if you think that I am mixing the community and business, slap me, hit me and correct me. I need you to do that. Ooh, and thanks to all of you who SMS-ed me, send me postcards and mail to congratulate me. I really appreciated that. And I sure will miss my nice colleagues over at Getronics-PinkRoccade, Dr John and Alessio to name two.

I was planning on making a videocast but the amount of post production was too much, kudos to everyone investing so much time in them!