The Age of David(s) and Goliath

First of all a huge thank you for all the support and encouragement after the announcement in my last post. Glad that I managed to write it finally, I posted a link on twitter and then went out to celebrate my daughter's b'day - a party for her and her school friends. Like Christmas, my daughter's b'day is almost a whole week event too :). My job at the party was mainly to play with my son..and not to confuse my credit cards' pin number with my last company's VPN pin :)

...that's when I started getting words of support and encouragement on twitter for my new adventure. Every little helps at this stage and I got a lot more than that! So thank you very much for that, means a lot. Also, I thought to capture some of these messages and when needed, use it as a source of inspiration later :).

RT @rmtiwari New post on my blog >> It is the best of times.. : http://t.co/KdkwLVurNn …> best of luck to you, thought of @thorstenster too
— Tammy Powlas (@tpowlas) December 28, 2013

Above tweet was from Tammy with a reference to Thorsten Franz. I, myself, am rarely involved with SAP community except as a lurker :) but even I know that Tammy is considered a living embodiment of community spirit within SAP circles. Thorsten is the pioneer among us and a few months back, he started Operatics, focusing on HANA and steering us towards a future of converging OLAP and OLTP. As mentioned in his announcement post :

...by offering consulting, architecting, strategy, and custom development on how to use SAP HANA for operational and hybrid operational-analytical applications. There are an awful lot of things you can do with HANA to bring new capabilities to operational applications such as SAP’s Business Suite or your own custom ABAP developments.    

I think it's a great opportunity for customers to get direct access to expertise of world-class solution providers, like Thorsten, who has a wealth of experience and expertise related to SAP Solution development - apart from being a HANA distinguished engineer. I think, this is a primary and unique selling point of small, focused start-ups over big solution providers - that clients can get direct access to a pioneer, passionate, proven and pragmatic consultant.

However, as the title of this post indicates, I don't think it's about David *vs.* Goliath - it won't serve the purpose. In 21st century, It should be about David *&* Goliath - working together - both bringing their own strengths on the table - agility, expertise, ideas & scale, structure, platform.

I am unable to share the tweet from Arun Bala (private twitter account), who obviously was envious of my photograph with Sachin :) nonetheless I got several good wishes, pointers from him....and I might be able to tap into his experiences as I guess he has been working on something exciting and waiting to reveal it soon.

Grateful for Jon and Vijay's kind words and offer of help. Vijay even forwarded the link for Vishal Sikka's attention.

@vijayasankarv @rmtiwari " Let me know how we can help" -> +1!
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) December 28, 2013

> @vijayasankarv: http://t.co/tbT8MIpFvU .. hey @vsikka .. @rmtiwari .. left his day job to ..startup < we should open a club or something
— greg misiorek (@greg_not_so) December 28, 2013

@vijayasankarv @rmtiwari Many more will be excited by his picture with Sachin, right? http://t.co/KdkwLVurNn > great advertisement :)

— Tammy Powlas (@tpowlas) December 28, 2013

Starting on a new adventure, alone ...can sometime be..well a lonely business. And that's why Greg's suggestion to begin some collaboration/sharing between us - little SAP start-ups - is an important one. Obviously we'll have to do this ourselves and I hope we can setup something to enable this. Shedding my inhibitions, I'll try to reach out - also to try and get some leads for future opportunities from within my circle of friends, ex-colleagues etc.

Several others congratulated and wished me good luck on twitter as well as on LinkedIn so again a big thank you.

I hope, for me, 2014 will be the year of unprecedented learning, sharing, playing with my kids and living my dream...and I hope the same for all of you too....may be we can make it sustainable as well - have our cake and eat it too ;)

Apart from technical SAP topics, I also want to share little things - for example : Though I've put together several websites in the past myself, I bought a template for my own website PrgmatiQa . But I also made a two page website template using this bootstrap tool later for my brother-in-law's start-up (non-IT), that could be useful for someone else. Interestingly, my brother - who is a lawyer - somehow managed to put together a workable website for our brother-in-law's start-up. Talk about hackers all the way down :)

Also, I didn't have any image to put on my website so I made a word cloud, mainly using words from my CV. Just these little operational details from a lean pragmatic start-up - the idea is to get on with the priorities quickly rather than spending too much time, effort and money on the operational setup. Next for me is to look into AWS for SAP system-hosting and decide which package/OS will be ideal. And also document some of my prototypes in next Blog posts.

Wishing all, including my family, friends, ex-colleagues et all, a very happy new year!