In January 2005, we started The Beagle Armada, an IT company that focused on the Care sector (AWBZ) where a huge project had started in order to introduce electronic messaging in the sector and to get more insight in the number of people that needed care and get a grip on the type of care they needed. Since we, the three founders of The Beagle Armada, already had done some free-lance consulting work in the area, we had a head start when developing products for health care. Our business was in the streamlining of the electronic communication by providing consultancy in assessing the infrastructure and creating a test suite for messages. First we did this just in the Care sector, but soon the Cure sector followed where we were involved in implementing the electronic health record. After a year, we employed 12 people, and we were 16 when I stepped down from the board of directors to make room for a new partner. The start-up of The Beagle Armada had been a hectic period in which we had to conquer the almost mandatory cashflow problems in a growing company, but we also suffered the loss of our partner Hans due to cancer.</p><p>My role in the company was mostly acquisition, alignment of the wishes and requirements of our customers with IT, managing of the internal projects, coaching of the new employees, and consulting. I advised a governmental institution how to create the architecture for national exchange of messages in a secure enviroment, and made a plan for implementation of the electronic health records for a large software supplier. I also designed the data infrastructure for a business intelligence environment for a health insurer. In collaboration with the government we designed a test suite for the standardized messages and their validation, which led to involvement in the test procedures for the national health infrastructure. I managed the project in which we made a dummy message hub that would check integrity and validity of the messages and underlying SOAP protocol. One of the reasons that we were picked as a small company was our in-depth knowledge of the health care sector, so we could pinpoint the problems easily and could provide the solutions.