The lost outpost

About

Andy Piper is a Social Bridgebuilder, and a Consulting IT Specialist working for IBM Software Group in the UK.

Most of the time you will be reading his musings on IBM, life, technology, and photography. This is a fairly wide spectrum of topics – particularly since the “life” category could cover anything and everything that catches his attention!

Bio

Andy Piper has been with IBM Software Group since 2001. He is part of the Software Group Development Laboratories, where his “day job” is to define product futures, produce collateral and improve software consumability, particularly around the WebSphere brand and Connectivity portfolio. Andy is a key ambassador for IBM’s internal BlueIQ social software community and has been championing the use of social media inside the enterprise for a number of years. He is one of the founding members of IBM’s Virtual Universe Community and has also been involved with the eightbar grassroots technical community almost since it began in 2005.

Andy is probably best known online as a “social bridgebuilder” who spans a number of different areas of technology and interest. His weblog The Lost Outpost reflects the diversity of his skills and interests: development, design, communications, social media, community building, marketing, gaming and digital imaging. He is a regular co-host of the Dogear Nation podcast, a leading member of IBM Hursley’s eightbar community, and also one of the organisers of Home Camp.

Andy is a regular conference speaker on various topics, ranging from WebSphere to Virtual Worlds to social software. Furthermore, Andy is a member of the British Computer Society and is a Chartered IT Professional. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern History from Brasenose College, Oxford University, in the UK.

For images of Andy, please check visit this Flickr set:


 

Technical background

For the first seven years of his career at IBM, Andy was a member of IBM Software Services for WebSphere, and worked with customers to assist with the implementation of WebSphere products. His specialist areas are the messaging and integration families within the WebSphere portfolio. In particular, he has done a lot of work with WebSphere Message Broker, and has written articles and books on that subject. He also has a special interest in performance and scalability issues, and has worked on a number of major performance benchmarks using IBM WebSphere and DB2 technologies.

Go to IBM

Andy holds the following IBM certifications:

  • IBM Certified SOA Solution Designer (2007)
  • IBM Certified SOA Associate
  • IBM Certified Solution Developer – WebSphere Message Broker V6
  • IBM Certified System Administrator – WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker V5
  • IBM Certified Solution Designer – WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker V5
  • IBM Certified System Administrator – WebSphere MQ V5.3

He is a member of the British Computer Society and is a Chartered IT Professional.

Prior to joining IBM, Andy spent several years working with distributed middleware technologies such as MQ and DCE for a major communications company in the UK, and has wide experience with enterprise computing environments using a variety of platforms and standards. In the dim and distant past, Andy programmed for the RISC OS operating system on Acorn computers, and had a business providing educational software to UK schools.

Andy’s other interests include photography, music, video editing, and travel – particularly to Poland, where his wife’s family live.

Andy holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern History from Brasenose College, Oxford University, in the UK.

You can find out more about Andy and his interests from these other sites:

There is a bit more information about when, how and why Andy started blogging back in his first blog entry (which isn’t actually the first entry by date, but there’s a reason for that…).

As well as this personal weblog, Andy also contributes to eightbar, the IBM Hursley blog; the GreaterIBM blog for IBMers and IBM alumni; Home Camp, the home hacking, automation and green technology community; A Smarter Planet, the IBM Smarter Planet community blog; SOA Tips’n'Tricks, a blog about IBM’s Service Oriented Architecture technology; and Hursley on WebSphere MQ, from the people who brought the world MQSeries.

Press and other coverage

Contact

You can contact Andy via email, by phone on +44 1512 664305 (which will cause an email to be sent) or +44 20 3287 1302 (SkypeIn / voicemail), on Skype (andypiperuk), or on Twitter (@andypiper).

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