Business Travel - Turin, Rotterdam & Dubai

My last post for this year, looking back it has been a productive year for me. Happy new year everyone!

Turin is just beautiful with Alps in the background.


Dubai again, this time I brought my mom along since she's never been to Dubai before.

Also while working in Rotterdam, my wife joined me to explore Amsterdam.

Beautiful KL

I always admire the beauty of any cities surrounded by natural setting like sydney by the harbour, istanbul by the strait, paris by the river etc etc. In KL's case, it is surrounded by the mountains as captured from my office below. Just beautiful.

SAP Conference in Singapore

Attended SAP conference in Singapore last week. It was pretty informative and encouraging to see the future direction of SAP. Also took some time to bring the family to Universal Studios at Sentosa Island. It was really a fun day.

Dubai 2nd Visit & Knee Surgery

A very busy time indeed for me. Before my scheduled knee surgery, need to oversee first my project in Dubai. Took this opportunity to bring my family over especially for Ramadhan experiences. As for my knee surgery, I decided to go ahead to fix my knee permanently. I got my ACL in 2005 and compounded the injury recently with bucket handle. So it's better to fix this while I'm still young. The surgery went smoothly albeit the recovery process will take some time. But looking forward to be normal again :).

At Dubai Marina

Nice Burj Al Arab view from Souk Medinat Jumeirah

Recovering....

Business Trip to Dubai

My first assignment and a maiden visit to Dubai. A very modern city and a little bit expensive overall. But it was great to see Dubai diversifying their economy beyond oil. PLI Middle East operation is based in Dubai but the entity is reporting to South Africa office. I am responsible to setup and evaluate ERP system to support Middle East operation. Definitely need to be here again to oversee the implementation stage later.

View from Burj Khalifa park

Burj Khalifa - It's really tall!

Burj Al Arab - The sixth star hotel

View from PLI office

A New Journey

I’m on the move again (hoping to settle down). And I'm back to my ‘root’ (sort of). I knew one day I’ll be serving back Petronas as I am truly grateful for the opportunity given to me previously. After more than 10 years exploring in my career development with different companies and role, travelling around the world to earn more experiences, becoming a husband and a father of two kids, I think it’s about the time to look for more stability and challenging experiences in my career. And Petronas is the most suitable candidate I can think of. For sentiment reason, challenging career development and of course contribution to nation development while having job stability and security (well, midlife priority is changing). The job is no easy task and would be the most challenging. Petronas Lubricants International (PLI) is about to embark a quantum leap of business transformation and I’ll be responsible to oversee this transformation from system (SAP) perspective. This completely change my role from ‘delivery’ mode to ‘architect’ mode. It will be long journey and it just started. But I love my new role, I can see everything from above and I have 360 degrees view of all – from technology perspective, design & architecture perspective, business process perspective to conversation with different kind of professionals such as management consultants, PMO consultants, SI Consultants, respective Head of Business functions and many more. It will be interesting journey ahead….

Cuti-cuti Malaysia 2015

We went to the north, beautiful Langkawi island & to the south, Legoland at Johor Bahru.

My Android App project - InviteApp

Happy New Year 2015!

Been really busy lately. Anyway, Aqeel has started his journey on primary school chapter and he looked happy and anxious at the same time on his first day. But he was steady, not crying lol.

Also, I just launched InviteApp - my own personal pet project for Android app. Just started my own ad as below in facebook. It's pretty encouraging with the 'likes' the ad earned, but conversion to install is still low. My app can be found in the google play in the link below. I will share the progress of my pet project later :).
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inviteapp.inviteapp 

HP to split

 

I have mixed feeling on this. The company will be divided into two separate companies each with almost same revenue and profit. On one hand, I thought bigger is better since HP could provide end to end solution. But managing mammoth organization is complex. The idea of the split is to ensure each company could focus more on the respective business, HP Enterprise will provide consulting services while HP Inc could focus on hardware business. At the moment, all employees are eagerly waiting the management next action on how to split this and what their fate are. My personal preference would be to stay in HP Enterprise, that's the future especially for SAP Consultant like myself. I like the idea HP could diversify their services to external clients rather than internal alone as we have been equipped with niche skills and knowledge implementing solution for HP internal process. The good thing working with HP as SAP Consultant, we have access to all SAP latest products and expertise from SAP. Anyway, it will take a year until the split can be finalized, until then finger crossed is all I can say...