Microsoft MVP 2018-2019

I am proud to announce that I was awarded today by Microsoft, with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for 2018-2019 for Microsoft Azure. This is my 12th consecutive Microsoft MVP award since 2007, and I couldn’t be more excited about this one.

This shield stays on my desk, which I proudly stare every day,  waiting for the 2018-19 batch to arrive.

According to Microsoft: The Microsoft MVP Award is a unique opportunity to honor technology experts who have shown a deep commitment to innovation and have made outstanding contributions to their communities. This might be through speaking engagements, creating content, providing expert feedback or organizing events – but most importantly, the award is given to those who are passionate about technology, and have great community spirit!

There were some recent changes in the MVP program, in the past, there used by 4 renewal cycles in a year for every quarter, but from this year all the Microsoft MVP’s are announced on 1st of July. This kind of created a social media storm yesterday across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Based on the official Microsoft announcement, there are only 2600 awardees (and only 37 new) to cover the entire Microsoft platform, given the scale of the Microsoft ecosystem with millions of developers and technology enthusiast I feel it’s an outstanding credibility to have under your belt. I congratulate all the new and past MVP’s who obtained this milestone.

Year on Year the competition level is increasing, which is a good thing. The technology landscape is moving fast, it good to see the experienced people competing with the young millennials to sustain their position.

When your entire career is dedicated to working on Microsoft platforms (I never worked on anything else since 1997, i.e 20 years), there is no better feeling than being awarded as a Microsoft MVP.

Today as a CEO of a software product company (BizTalk360, Serverless360, Document360 & Atomic Scope), the majority of my day is more of people management, but I still find my way through opportunities to make my hand dirty and get on technical activities. Out of all my tasks and priorities, the one I love the most is the technical product owner responsibility, where I experience the product, give candid feedback to my team and architectural decisions we had to make to create better products. More or less I incline towards more technical work throughout the day.

Due to this personal characteristics, now as a company, we are more community focused. Recently we successfully executed the worlds largest Microsoft Integration focused event in London INTEGRATE 2018 (with 440 people), in addition to our regular weekly webcasts (Integration Monday, Middleware Friday) and Techmeet360.

Once again Congratulations to all Renewed and New MVP’s, looking forward to contributing and scale more this year.