About

My name is Paul Tap. I'm a self-employed ICT professional, most of the times working under the moniker "Armorica" which also is the name the company I started in 2003. In the past 25+ years I have worked in many roles and on many projects. I started my working life in the worlds of ERP systems, in 1994. As programmer/system engineer I learned about UNIX around that time and after I encountered Linux in 1998 I never looked back for other operating systems. That also was the time I learned about Open Source Software and seeing how hard it was then to see Open Source getting adapted in the commercial world I founded Armorica.
In the first years I still did a lot of work in ERP and was happy to see more and more Linux adoption over the years. I also did some Open Source projects, mainly vTiger CRM and Compiere. Besides that, I on average spent 20% of my time on research, a lot of that in the field of virtualization, creating extremely low footprint VM platforms etc.

During the whole of my career I noticed that software projects/developers and system engineers often had a hard time getting along. In order to understand the hard-core systemengineering side of things I worked in that role for over 3 years, to get a good understanding of the daily challenges of that role. During that period I also broadened my knowledge in the area of networking and architecture.
Initialy I did most of my projects in the financial industry. In 2019 though, I got trained in the field of Smart Mobility and made the switch to this field. Over the past two years I worked as the architect for a platform for the Smart City market and as the main developer of one of the components of that platform, CMDBuild.

All and all, this professional journey has given me a deep insight in many aspects of the ICT world. I've seen technology come, go and come back. Much has changed it seems, but has it really?
It all depends on how you look at it. I hate to see people fall for the "Hype du Jour" and adopt every new tool, framework, hardware and discard it ever so easy again after a short while. ICT still has a hard time living up its promisses and I would be lying if I said that I never was part of that. But 25+ years of experience do bring some advantages in the end.

Therefor I think my added value is in helping customers make good, sustainable decisions when designing, building and deploying new ICT systems. Keeping a good eye on long- and mid-term goals of the organization. Keeping a balanced mix of proven technology and new techniques, but always focused on the main stakeholder of every ICT system, the user.