Maarten Moerman is a Dutch technology specialist, entrepreneur and collector whose career has largely revolved around software, the Internet and network infrastructure, alongside longstanding interests in photography, classic cars and motorcycles, engineering and restoration.
He began his professional career as a programmer in the 1990s, at a time when the Internet was only beginning to become commercially established in the Netherlands. His first company was Agrotel, an agricultural information service whose technological roots went back to the pre-Web era.
Agrotel distributed information through Videotex, or VTX, an interactive electronic information system that allowed users to retrieve pages of information long before websites became commonplace. As the World Wide Web began to replace systems such as Videotex, Moerman worked on automating the transition, developing software that could take information from the existing VTX environment and make it available on the Internet.
It was an early introduction not only to programming for the Web, but to the infrastructure required to make Internet services work. Hosting an online service at the time often meant building much of the environment around it as well. Moerman became involved with servers, connectivity and the construction of an early ISP environment, and his interests gradually shifted from the software running on the Internet towards the networks underneath it.
He later joined Solcon, one of the early independent Internet service providers in the Netherlands. Working for an ISP put networking and Internet infrastructure at the centre of his professional work, and network engineering became his main technical field.
That eventually took him to eBay, where he worked as a Senior Network Engineer and later became Manager of Network Engineering at eBay Classifieds Group. There he worked on the network and data-centre infrastructure supporting a number of international online marketplaces.
The work covered large IP networks, BGP, MPLS, L3VPNs, data-centre networking and the increasing automation and virtualisation of infrastructure. A Juniper Networks case study from this period identifies Moerman as Manager of Network Engineering and describes eBay Classifieds Group’s move towards software-defined networking, combining its existing MP-BGP and L3VPN architecture with Juniper Contrail and QFX data-centre switching.
During the same period, Moerman became involved with Observium, the network-monitoring platform. Through his work at eBay and Marktplaats.nl, he sponsored development of the project and commissioned the implementation of its original alerting system, extending Observium from network discovery and monitoring into active infrastructure alerting. He also contributed documentation and practical monitoring examples to the project and remained involved with Observium and related tooling in later years.
