Frank Siebert

Born in 1969 I started off pretty normal. I went to school, I cared a lot about sports and grew up to a height of 1,97 m. After finishing school I went to the Bundeswehr for 2 years. Shortly before starting the Bundeswehr I had a handball accident and injured my knee. Finishing the Bundeswehr I went to Hannover to start to my study of constructual engineering  at the university. 

Until now you can say that everything went according to the plan. But then I got a job at the CeBit in Hannover. Until this time Computer did not mean a lot to me. In my early teens I had a Commodore C64 and I mainly cared about playing games. But I consider this as pretty normal for a 13 year old boy. Afterwards my computer experience was mainly fixing the AT 286SX of my father whenever he broke it (btw: I still need to do that today :-). Somewhen I got my own first Personal Computer but I was only typing my homework study for the university on it. My main focus was still on the study and playing handball semi professional.

But working at the CeBIT - meeting some nice interesting people and getting to know the business a bit I started an IT practise in Hamburg during the winter break at the university. And what should I say: I got infected. Since then something very nice happend to me. I started to work in the IT business and I was able to merge my hobby and my work at the same time. So from this time on working productivly in a business environment and having fun was exactly the same thing.

After I realized that IT is exactly what I want to do I started with some Microsoft educations and stopped my study and joined my first company. It was a small software company with about 40 employees and about 350 customers. My first manager allowed me to train on the job and gave me the necessary education also as I was doing Microsoft exams. With this solid basic knowledge (I still consider this knowledge as my toolbox) it was pretty easy to grow as well in experience as gaining responsibilities. So since then things went pretty straight and I still feel the same satisfaction on the job after 7 years.

After my company was aquired by Baan Company I started to work on a bigger scale. Until then I only had to care about 60 users. Suddenly Baan Germany alone had 1100 users and worldwide we had 7500 Users. At first I was working as an NT administrator caring mainly about the German users, their User accounts and their mailboxes. Then I took on responsibilities for the Y2K update project in Germany and as a second major project moving the Baan Germany headquarter into one single location. Mainly the Y2K project showed me the necessarity of asset and licence tracking, standards, procedures, trackable infrastructure and a strong focus on security and anti virus protection. These topics were quickly becoming my main focus in IT then and they still are.

Please see my full career path here: Curriculum Vitae.