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.
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