While in DEC, I was fortunate to travel the globe doing OpenVMS/cluster/hardware country support, consulting and training. Also in DEC, I did a few years as Customer Support Centre (CSC) L2 support for Oracle Rdb (before the sale to Oracle), ACMS, DECforms and other TP products (ok, who remembers CDD, Datatrieve, DECset?)
Was also part of the DEC WW Windows NT Wizard program which some might remember as DEC's attempts to better align with Microsoft. We did annual trips to Seattle with other DEC folks to meet Microsoft Engineering resources. Microsoft Eng would review their future roadmaps with us and discuss issues and common problems that we were seeing in the field.
As part of HP Consulting Services NA Datacenter (DC) Consolidation practice, I was engaged in loads of interesting DC infrastructure, services and application migration projects. Dealt with both ancient and then state of the art, multi-vendor, multi-platform technologies. Left HP in 2012 to begin a private consulting career in DC and Application/Service Workload Migrations Consultant. Spent the last 10 years as a Consultant in the role of a Technical Lead in the Government of Canada (Shared Services Canada - SSC) DC Migration Program. The role included designing strategy, methodologies, processes and implementation R&R for migrating many, many Application workloads, network cutovers and support services from legacy sites to enterprise DC's.
My interest in databases and systems integration work started with DEC back in the days when we received 6 weeks Rdb training in Colorado Springs, US. Now those were great training courses! Working with my colleague, Wolfgang Burger, participants in this community forum, and our soon-to-be Partners, I look forward to being part of a new age for databases and application integration projects and technologies.