Profile
After working as a software engineer at KPMG and Origin, Gero grew into
the architect role when he starting working at Sun Microsystems. Now, at
Xebia, Gero is applying his experience to help customers to build better
solutions.
In his solutions Gero pays extra attention to the use of open standards
and the non-functional requirements to ensure that a solution operates
correct under todays and future conditions. Solutions based on open
standards are easier to integrate, more prepared for the future and the
required skills to build and maintain them are more available. Paying
attention to non-functional requirements in the initial phases of the
project injects quality into to the solution from the start.
Over the last years Gero successfully executed numerous projects at
Telecommunications operators. Lately he has been promoting the use of
standards based solutions based on the OSS/J specifications that are
targeted at Telecommunications. Gero is a member of the Java Community Process
Expert Group that defined the JSR 264 OSS/J Order Management API.
While architecting OSS/J based solutions
Gero applied concepts from Service Oriented Architectures in order to
design loosely coupled systems. Working in this challenging environment
enables Gero to stay up to date with many technologies that play a role in
Service Oriented Architectures.
Recently Gero joined the Telemanagement Forum's TIP Programs Framework team and
the Ordering and Activation team. This Program builds on OSS/J, MTOSI and other
Telemanagement Forum standards and targets to deliver a consolidated
new set of APIs.
Gero mostly acts as an architect working together with subject matter
experts from the customer to capture requirements and architect/design
solutions. He keeps his Java hands-on skills up by actively participating
in the development phase of projects and building proof of concepts.
Acting as a coach for a development team, leading workshops are other
roles that Gero frequently fulfills.
|
Skills
METHODOLOGIES AND TECHNIQUES: Rational Unified Process, SunTone AM, XP, Scrum, UML.
TECHNOLOGIES: J2SE (1.3, 1.4, 1.5), J2EE, JMX, XML, Spring, SOAP, RDBMS, LDAP.
SPECIFICATIONS: J2EE, MMS, OSS/J.
TOOLS: Ant, JUnit, Apache Axis, JAXB, OptimizeIt, TogetherJ, JProbe, CruiseControl, CVS, Maven, Various IDEs, Enterprise Architect.
INFRASTRUCTURAL SOFTWARE: BEA WebLogic Application Server, SunOne Application Server, Tomcat, SonicMQ, Sun Message Queue, Sun Directory Server, Apache WebServer, Squid Proxy Server.
OPERATING SYSTEMS: Linux (RedHat, Mandrake, Ubuntu), Solaris.
OFFICE TOOLS: Open Office, MS-Office.
Employment History
Senior Consultant
at
Xebia
(January 2006-Present)
Projects:
| Project | Realize fulfillment design for business market |
| Period | October 2008-Present |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Assignment |
After creating the fulfillment design for the business market (see previous project),
the operator decided that it should be realized on the same integration platform that
was already in production for consumer market. My role was to inject the knowledge of
the business market solution into the existing team, identify gaps and ensure that these
are resolved. Also details of the design had to be aligned with the existing platform
to ensure a consistent approach across consumer and business market.
October2008 |
| Role | Architect |
| Project | Fulfillment integration platform for business market |
| Period | August 2008-October 2008 |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Assignment |
Designed fulfillment integration platform for business market for large operator in The Netherlands.
The project focussed on
the OSS domain and took commercial orders from the BSS domain and decomposes them into
service orders that are fulfilled by a range of OSS systems. The product offering included
product like location access, internet, voice, domain/mail/webhosting, backup connectivity, etc.
The operator already made several attempts to design such a solution and with out focussed team
we managed to complete the design. It did require a significant amount of alignment with
many departments in order to get the end-to-end picture clear. My main role was to discuss and align with
OSS system owners on the interfaces to be used for intergration and ensure that consistency in aspects
spanning multiple OSS systems.
August2008October2008 |
| Role | Architect |
| Project | Technical Architect at Dutch Railways |
| Period | April 2008-July 2008 |
| Industry | Public transport |
| Assignment |
Technical architect at the Dutch Railways in the Competency Center Internet group.
In this role focused on integration aspects of publicly exposed web site(s) with internal
services.
April2008July2008 |
| Role | Architect |
| Project | TM Forum TIP Program Framework team |
| Period | April 2008-Present |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Assignment |
Leading the development of the Compatibility Technology Kit (CTK) framework for the
TMF TIP Program. This framework will be used by all TIP APIs to build their CTK. Also
acting as a reviewer for the other deliverables of the TIP Framework team.
April2008 |
| Role | Architect, Implementor |
| Project | TM Forum TIP Program Ordering and Activation team |
| Period | July 2008-Present |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Assignment |
Member of the TIP Ordering and Activation team. This team's goal is to consolidate
efforts from the TMF OSS/J and MTOSI communities in the order management and activation areas
into one consolidated API.
July2008 |
| Role | Architect, Implementor |
| Project | Define reference architecture for enterprise catalogue |
| Period | October 2007-March 2008 |
| Industry | Telecommunications, cable |
| Assignment |
In cooperation with service provider staff defined a reference architecture for enterprise catalogue. The scope of the
enterprise catalogue was product/service/resource and must to cover both the catalogue and the inventory.
The enterprise catalogue must fit into a loosely coupled environment, should use standards where applicable
and is decomposed into a number of logical components that may be realized using COTS products.
The reference architecture will be used in the product selection process.
October2007March2008 |
| Role | Architect |
| Project | Define canonical datamodel for SOA based integration |
| Period | August 2007-November 2007 |
| Industry | Telecommunications, cable |
| Assignment |
Based on TelemanagementForums Shared Information and Data model (SID) defined a canonical data model
that meets the integration requirements for large international service provider. This data model will be used
in the SOA based integrations in the provider and eventually be used on a pan european basis.
Because the SID is abstract several challenges had to be solved to make the model usable, understandable
and more precise. These challenges were addressed by defining and applying a number of design rules in addition to the
SID design rules. In order to not break compatibility with SID based APIs like OSS/J we ensured that with the
newly defined/applied design rules, mapping to SID was still possible and straightforward.
August2007November2007 |
| Role | Architect |
| Project | Architect/design assurance solution for business customers of service provider |
| Period | February 2007-June 2007 |
| Industry | Telecommunications, cable |
| Assignment |
In cooperation with service provider staff architected and designed an assurance solution for
their B2B customers. This involved designing of flows, interfaces based on OSS/J standards (TT and Inventory),
domain model.
February2007June2007 |
| Role | Architect |
| Project | Transition to loosely coupled OSS environment |
| Period | Augustus 2006-February2007 |
| Industry | Telecommunications, cable |
| Assignment |
Large international service provider is replacing their legacy BSS and OSS architecture by more standards based
and loosely coupled implementation. In scope of this project Gero executed a number of
tasks. The overarching task was to help the service provider to design and implement
various OSS/J based APIs (Inventory Management, Order Management and
Trouble Ticketing). Gero on one side defined how the APIs are best used in the
service providers context, and on the other side assisted vendors of OSS systems
to correctly implement the OSS/J APIs on their systems.
An second task was to define a global domain model based on TelemanagementForums
Shared Information and Data model and the OSS/J Core Business Entities. This
model will ease integration between various OSS and BSS systems and will
be used on the ESB that is realized as part of the larger project.
Gero also acted as the subject matter expert
on the service providers behave for the interfaces of the Inventory Management system.
Augustus2006February2007 |
| Role | Architect |
| Project | TCK framework for OSS/J APIs |
| Period | May2006-Present |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Assignment |
Designed and build a proof of concept for the Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK)
framework for the OSS/J APIs. Goal of this TCK was to be able to test
all integration profiles for the API with one test set. The framework
abstract the differences in integration profile from the functional
tests.
May2006 |
| Role | Designer, programmer |
| Project | Review implementation of Partner Gateway |
| Period | |
| Industry | Telecommunications, cable |
| Assignment |
Reviewed the implementation of the Partner Gateway for which we defined
the architecture earlier. The implementation was done by another party
and the customer invited us to review the design and implementation
of the Partner Gateway.
July2006 |
| Role | Reviewer |
| Project | UWV - VDA |
| Period | April2006-July2006 |
| Industry | Government |
| Assignment |
Acted as technical project lead in the go-live phase of the project.
Coordinated issue management, performance improvement actions and
hand over to operations.
April2006July2006 |
| Role | Technical Project Lead |
| Project | Define OSS/J Inventory XML/JMS interface Cramer |
| Period | |
| Industry | Telecommunications, cable |
| Assignment |
Designed the XML Schema's to expose parts of Cramer inventory management
system as OSS/J compliant messages.
XML Schema's and the exchange patterns are based on and extended from
the OSS/J Common and OSS/J Inventory specifications.
March2006 |
| Role | Designer |
| Project | Define OSS/J Service Activation XML/JMS interface for Partner Gateway |
| Period | |
| Industry | Telecommunications, cable |
| Assignment |
Designed the XML Schema for Service Activation part of the Partner Gateway and
message exchange patterns.
XML Schema's and the exchange patterns are based on and extended from
the OSS/J Common and OSS/J Service Activation specifications.
March2006 |
| Role | Designer |
| Project | Define Parter Gateway Architecture |
| Period | January 2006-February 2006 |
| Industry | Telecommunications, cable |
| Assignment |
Define the architecture for a Partner Gateway that
enables a large cable ISP to
activate value added services for their customers
at third parties in a consistent, secure and reliable way.
These third parties provide the actual
service, but the cable ISP remain the point of contact
for the customers. The internal interfaces are based
on the OSS/J Service Activation and Trouble Ticket
specification. The external interface can be adapted
to the capabilities of the third parties. Special
attention was paid to the use of open standards,
loose coupling and security for the message exchange
with the third parties.
January2006February2006 |
| Role | Architect |
Achievements:
-
Member of Java Community Process JSR 264 OSS/J Order Management Expert Group.
-
Presented at JavaOne ("How to Integrate Your Order Order Management Solution in a SOA", May 2007)
-
Presented at Telemanagement World Nice ("Streamline Order Management in your SOA with OSS/J", May 2007)
-
Presented at Telemanagement World Dallas ("Converge your Order Management", November 2007)
Java Architect
at
Sun Microsystems
(March 2000-December 2005)
Projects:
| Project | OSS/J Managed Entity Factory |
| Period | |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Assignment |
Build a generator for OSS/J managed entities. The use of this
generator eliminates boring and error prone work for developers that
are building OSS/J based applications. The generator takes an
Modello .mdo file as input and generates the interfaces, classes,
XML (de)serializers, and XML schemas for the managed entities defined
in the .mdo file.
October2005 |
| Role | Programmer |
| Project | Coaching for a Sun Java Enterprise System Access Manager implementation |
| Period | May 2005-October 2005 |
| Industry | publishing |
| Assignment |
(partime) Coached an customer of Sun that was implementing the Access Manager for
a number of dutch newspapers.
May2005October2005 |
| Role | Coach |
| Project | Architect solution based on OSS/J Service Activation API |
| Period | April 2005-May 2005 |
| Industry | Telecommunications, cable |
| Assignment |
Architected a solution for a Telecommunications provider that automates the
provisioning of network elements for customers of this Telecommunications provider.
The solution was based on SOA concepts and the OSS/J Service Activation API and
includes a workflow engine that enable the Telecommunications provider to
customize the business process per (set of) customers (e.g. certain
wholesale customers have specific requirements).
April2005May2005 |
| Role | Architect |
| Project | Customized LDAP replication |
| Period | December 2005-April 2005 |
| Industry | ISV |
| Assignment |
Architected, designed and implemented a LDAP replication
mechanism that replicates changes made to Sun
Directory Server to one or more LDAPv3 compliant
Directory Servers. Detection of changed entries was based on
the Retro Changelog plugin of the Sun Directory Server.
Apart from straight replication a retry logic component had to be developed to cope
with temporary failures on the target system JMS was used
to guarantee integrity in the replication system, to
decouple source and destination systems and make use of
the pub-sub concept of topics.
During this project we used JMX, Spring and the new language features of
Java 5. Maven was used to organized the development environment and process.
December2005April2005 |
| Role | Architect, designer, programmer |
| Project | Email billing solution |
| Period | August 2004-November 2004 |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Assignment |
Architected billing solution that enabled a mobile operator to charge
for various type of mail operations. Billing can be applied to mail operations
on the IMAP, SMTP and POP3 protocols. Solution consists of a proxy that
intercepts all mail traffic and triggers usage metering events to the
billing system. The communication to the billing system can be developed as
a plug-in for the email proxy, such that it is easy to add more functionality
to the mail proxy or switch from billing solution without much impact.
August2004November2004 |
| Role | Architect |
| Project | Electronic Bill Presentment at KPN Mobile |
| Period | |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Assignment |
Assisted the EBP project team in extending the functionality of the
Authorization Server.
June2004 |
| Role | Designer |
| Project | MMS 2.0 at KPN Mobile |
| Period | December 2003-May 2004 |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Assignment |
Lead architect on inception, elaboration,
and implementation of the 2.0 version of KPN Mobiles MMS platform. KPN's MMS
platform is based on a COTS MMSC which is wrapped by message processors.
The message processors intercept MM1, MM3, MM4 and MM7 traffic and execute
additional functionality that is not defined in the MMSC specifications.
This enables KPN to implement value added services independent of the release
cycle of the COTS MMSC. Adding additional functionality to the MMS service
this way is faster and cheaper than being dependent on the release cycle of the MMSC.
December2003May2004 |
| Role | Architect |
| Project | Authorization Server at KPN Mobile |
| Period | January 2003-February 2004 |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Assignment |
Elaboration and implementation
of delegate administration functionality for the Telecom Managers at KPN
Mobiles business customers.
January2003February2004 |
| Role | Architect, designer, programmer |
| Project | J2EE, Open Standards Proof of Concept for Oce |
| Period | |
| Industry | Manufacturing |
| Assignment |
Lead architect for a proof of concept which demonstrated that is it possible
to quickly build a system that took a scanned image (from
a copier) and transformed this into a searchable PDF document. The system was
comprised a number of webservices, each executing 1 step in the process flow.
December2002 |
| Role | Designer, programmer |
| Project | Streamline development process for Vizzavi Europe (Uk) |
| Period | February 2002-September 2002 |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Assignment |
Vizzavi (subsidiary of Vodafone) Europe was aiming for a distributed development
process coordinated by the European headquarters in London. In order to achieve this
a consistent build, release and test process, a pluggable architecture, and a
modularized code base implemented.
February2002September2002 |
| Role | Architect, coach |
| Project | Architectural Audit at Nordea Bank (Danmark) |
| Period | |
| Industry | Financial |
| Assignment |
Nordea was in the process of making their services web enabled. In order
to mitigate risks they have invested us to conduct an audit on their
integration layer. The audit report consisted of both technical and
process recommendations.
January2002 |
| Role | Reviewer |
| Project | Architectural and development coaching at ANWB.nl |
| Period | October 2001-September 2003 |
| Industry | Public service |
| Assignment |
Initially started as a 911 call when a new release of the ANWB.nl site
went to production and demonstrated to be very unstable. During a 2 year
period provided them with advice to improve the stability of the portal and
the development process. Initially the coaching was intense, later, when the
portal was stable, the focus was more on longer term improvement.
October2001September2003 |
| Role | Coach |
| Project | Vizzavi NL Portal |
| Period | June 2000-July 2001 |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Assignment |
Lead architect for the Vizzavi NL portal. Introduced the use of industry best
practices like source code control, J2EE patterns, structured testing,
build and release process, development of reusable components.
June2000July2001 |
| Role | Architect |
| Project | Aegon Vermogensperpectief |
| Period | August 2001-November 2001 |
| Industry | Financial |
| Assignment |
Developed a prototype web application that allowed Insurance Intermediates to
submit mutations on insurance policies to Aegon.
August2001November2001 |
| Role | Designer, programmer |
| Project | Several 911 calls |
| Period | March 2000-December2005 |
| Industry | Various |
| Assignment |
Helped customers to identify and solve problems in their applications that became
clear when the application went live. Most application were J2EE based and
problems were often caused by inexperience of the customer staff with
Java or development of web based applications.
March2000December2005 |
| Role | Troubleshooter |
Achievements:
-
Presented at world wide Sun Java Center meeting
("Patterns from a Portal Project", June 2000)
-
Presented at OneDay developer event ("Analyzing Memory and Performance
using JDK1.4 features", June 2003)
Software engineer
at
Origin
(July 1994-February 2000)
Projects:
| Project | KPN Hi Web site |
| Period | February 1999-February 2000 |
| Industry | Telecommunication |
| Assignment |
Requirements and interface specification for the Hi website of
KPN Telecom. Also assisted in testing.
February1999February2000 |
| Role | Designer |
| Project | Pets Travel Web Site for KLM Cargo |
| Period | November 1997-February 1999 |
| Industry | Airline |
| Assignment |
Designed and implemented a web site that enabled dog and cat owners
to book a flight for their pets and informed them about all
specific regulations that applied in the visited countries. The site
was implemented in Java.
November1997February1999 |
| Role | Designer, programmer |
| Project | Customer Care application for Rabobank |
| Period | |
| Industry | Financial |
| Assignment |
Implemented Java Applet based front end that abstracted all different
back end systems for the Customer Care staff.
|
| Role | Programmer |
| Project | Booking system for commercials |
| Period | July 1994-August 1996 |
| Industry | Media |
| Assignment |
Developed booking system for TV commercials at IP. IP is the agency
that sells the commercials for RTL 4 and 5. This was a client server
application, written in C++ that ran on Windows.
July1994August1996 |
| Role | Programmer |
Software engineer
at
KPMG Management Consultants
(July 1991-June1994)
Gero was part of the software engineering group and developed
applications for both KPMG internal use and for customers.
Programming languages were mostly C and C++ and the target
platforms were the Apple Macintosh and MS-Dos based machines.
Education
- in IT, June 1990
HTS Informatica Utrecht, The Netherlands - in
Java
Sun MicrosystemsSubjects
| Sun Certified Java Programmer | |
| Sun Certified Java Developer | |
| Sun Certified Java Architect | |
- in Professional Consulting, November 2006
de Baak, Management Centrum VNO-NCW - in Masterclass Enterprise Integration en SOA, December 2007
DNV CIBIT - in Consultant als regisseur, November 2008
Mientje Fluit, Liewe de Boer
Publications
- "
Presented at Sun OneDay event "Analyzing memory and performance
using JDK1.4 features"
". June 2003.
Last modified
$Date: 2008/11/30 19:27:48 $
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