New Year, New Responsibilities

I’ve spent the last 11 years or so at Microsoft working in a field called “Evangelism” targeting individuals in the IT ecosystem, Partners and Online Communities.  Basically – I’d talk with anyone who works in IT in the broadest sense and talk about “Microsoft Stuff” as part of a broad platform. It’s been awesome and I am thankful to have been part of the “Infrastructure Evangelism” movement within Microsoft since the very beginning.  Part of my recent responsibilities since moving to HQ 4 years ago has been engaging and working with the Azure Engineering team to enable them to evangelize their products / solutions as well as incorporating feedback from my various public and online activities INTO the planning process and formal feedback loop.

I shared this with my “internal audience” at Microsoft over the holiday break.  But I wanted to let YOU (the outside world) know I’ve accepted a new role as a Sr. Program Manager role in the Engineering world of Azure Compute. I’ve joined the “Linux, Scale Compute and Partner Strategy” team and my first day in the new office! I am really excited as working on the Engineering team has always been one of my long term goals ever since I joined Microsoft.

Leaving the official role of Technical Evangelist at Microsoft is not something I’ve taken lightly – it was a hard decision to make. Evangelism has been a phenomenal place to connect with individuals and champion the IT Pro Audience message both internally and externally at Microsoft. I’ve made lots of friends and met a metric tonne of people over the years – relationships I hope to still maintain in the new role. Don’t worry – I still plan on maintaining my passion for the IT Pro Audience and for creating useful, funny, entertaining Technical content on the Channel 9 platform. Evangelism skills are definitely in demand in a modern PM role at MSFT.

What sort of stuff will I be working on in the new role? Well that’s in a constant state of change and movement – it is the cloud, right? I’ve already started on a few small projects to get ramped up with some new ones on the horizon. I’ll be brushing up my Linux skills, working with a few key partners from an engineering stakeholders perspective and working with the overall engineering team to ramp up THEIR evangelism skills.

Don’t worry – I’m not disappearing… I’ll stay on the social networks ( Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn ).  I’ll keep on publishing on my blog Tech blog here (Regular IT Guy) and producing shows like Tuesdays with Corey and The Patch and Switch show on CH9.

NOTE: Oh hey! looks like they are posting an opening on my Old Job… Are you Interested in one of the most AWESOME jobs in the IT world? Ever wanted to work for Microsoft? Check out this job description, dust off your Resume and APPLY!