Since moving back to the North West in 2005 I’ve been contracting most of the time at AstraZeneca, in Macclesfield, Alderley Edge and Chorlton. I’ve been involved in a number of great projects, from invoice automation, through HCP honoraria systems, ERP integration (REST-informed, of course) and latterly the first truly global-scale travel & expense system, which we now have running in 70 countries, with over 60,000 users. The integration hubs I’ve built pump tens of thousands of transactions daily through the systems, and hundreds of thousands of master data records without a murmur. I’ve hacked on SAP, Ariba and Infor systems as well as building these custom integration hubs, and I designed and built a credit card feed processing system that’s become almost self-aware.

Life at AstraZeneca has been great; it’s one of the friendliest places to work, the people are great, and the location and facilities are second to none. I also met my wife and theoretical childhood sweetheart Michelle here. It’s not all been a bed of roses of course (nowhere is!) at times the work has been frustrating and increasingly there are too many layers between me and the code surface.

At heart I’m a coder and builder, driven by curiosity and the desire to learn, teach and implement.

So it’s with great excitement that, in January 2012, I’m joining Bluefin Solutions as a permanent member of the team. I’ve known many of the gang at Bluefin for a while, and feel as though I already have a lot in common with them. I’ve spoken at the Northern IT Directors’ Round Table for them, was their first guest blogger, and have bumped into many of them during SAP orientated events from SAP Evenings to SAP TechEds and beyond.

My official title will be “Senior SAP Development Architect” but there’s also an “Evangelist” flavour to my role, which I’ll be embracing and making my own. What attracts me to Bluefin in addition to the quality of their people is their drive, their leadership and their embrace of technology, and with that in mind, I’m really looking forward to helping research, steer and shape innovation in the Enterprise in the near future.

Hooray!