Azure Thursday May

Rohan Kumar

Corporate Vice President, Azure Data, Microsoft

As the Corporate Vice President of Azure Data, Rohan is the engineering leader responsible for the product strategy, technical vision, long range planning, design, development/implementation, and engineering process involving the certification and release of SQL Server and all Azure Data Services, including SQL DB, Cosmos DB, Database for MySQL, Database for PostgreSQL, Database for Maria DB, SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Databricks, Azure Data Lake, HDInsight, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Catalog and Microsoft’s Analytics Platform System (APS).

Ida Bergum

Manager at Avanade Data & AI | Power BI and Data Platform evangelist

Ida is a Manager in Avanade Data & AI, and a Power BI and Data Platform enthusiast. Ida is always eager to share knowledge on many Power BI topics, with special focus on admin, adoption, governance, self-service, embedded. She is also active in PBIUG Norway, Power Platform UG Norway and MDPUG Norway.

Martijn Beenker

data engineer @ Avanade

Martijn Beenker is a data engineer, working at Avanade since 2018. He’s been involved in enabling cloud monitoring skills in DevOps teams for the last three years and involved with analytics platform monitoring for the last five years. He’s also an amateur rock climber – slightly scared of heights.

Menaka Baskerpillai

Associate Software Engineer Accenture Digital

Menaka Baskerpillai working as an Associate Software Engineer at Accenture Digital, she is a tech enthusiastic blogger and an international speaker who speaks about cloud and .Net core. Menaka spends her value time in learning and sharing her knowledge to the community. She is also a Former Microsoft Student Partner and Mozilla Firefox student Ambassador. She is a Microsoft certified Resource in Azure and programming in c#. Menaka recognised as a Most valuable professional by c# corner community.

Scott Hanselman

Coder, Blogger, Teacher, Speaker, Author

I'm a programmer, teacher, and speaker. I work out of my home office in Portland, Oregon for the Web Platform Team at Microsoft. I blog about technology, culture, gadgets, diversity, code, the web, where we're going and where we've been. I'm excited about community, social equity, media, entrepreneurship and above all, the open web: https://www.hanselman.com/ I have three podcasts and a YouTube channel. One podcast is a weekly talk show on tech, one an occasional one hour essay on developer's lives, and one a social media and tech culture show with my friend Luvvie.

Rory Preddy

Cloud Advocate @ Microsoft

Rory works in the Developer Relations team at Microsoft as a Senior Cloud Advocate. Cloud Advocates use their deep research skills to help professional cloud developers discover and successfully use Microsoft’s platforms. A seasoned speaker whose talks are both meaningful and humorous, Rory travels around the world empowering developers to achieve more.

Andre van den Berg

Windows Insider MVP

Andre works with Azure, Office 365, Intune and automating things with PowerShell as a consultant at The Sourcing Company. He worked as a system/network administrator at Meyra for 18 years and helped people with everything related to IT while innovating the IT infrastructure at the same time. He enjoys attending meetups and events to learn new technologies, talk with interesting people and exchange stickers. He turned his hobby into his job and loves to blog, work on IoT projects at home and read books to his daughter.

Esther Barthel

Solutions Architect at cognition IT

Esther Barthel has worked in different roles and functions as an IT consultant after she finished her Master’s degree in Computer Science in 1997. She soon discovered that Server-Based Computing combined servers, desktops, and user experience in one solution and specialized in virtualization solutions, like Microsoft Remote Desktop Services, Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktop, Microsoft App-V, Microsoft PowerShell and Citrix ADC. Esther works as a Solutions Architect at cognition IT, where she combines her passion for designing and implementing Citrix solutions with her newfound love for DevOps automation, using PowerShell, REST APIs and JSON payloads to automate both on-premises and Cloud Infrastructure as Code solutions. Ever since she hosted introduction days for technical female student candidates Esther has shared her passion and knowledge for IT. As well as her experience in the CUGC Women in Tech mentorship program, founded by her and the other female CTPs. In addition to her MVP award for Cloud and Datacenter management, Esther is also awarded as a Citrix Technology Professional (CTP).

Freek Berson

Remoting Windows Enthusiast & Microsoft MVP

Freek Berson speaks at various conferences around the world including Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Ignite | The Tour, Microsoft TechSummit, Microsoft TechDays, Azure Saturday, BriForum, E2EVC, and ExpertsLive. Freek is awarded Microsoft MVP since 2011. He co-authored the book "RDS - The Complete Guide" which is available on Amazon. He works as an Infrastructure Specialist at Wortell, a system integrator company based in the Netherlands, where he focuses on End User Computing and all related technologies mostly on the Microsoft platform. He is also a managing partner at rdsgurus.com. He maintains his personal blog at http://themicrosoftplatform.net where he writes articles and blog posts related to Windows Virtual Desktop, Remote Desktop Services, Azure, and other Microsoft technologies. He is also experienced in performing automated deployments using Azure Resource Manager and designing JSON templates.

Esther Barthel

Solutions Architect at cognition IT

Esther Barthel has worked in different roles and functions as an IT consultant after she finished her Master’s degree in Computer Science in 1997. She soon discovered that Server-Based Computing combined servers, desktops, and user experience in one solution and specialized in virtualization solutions, like Microsoft Remote Desktop Services, Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktop, Microsoft App-V, Microsoft PowerShell and Citrix ADC. Esther works as a Solutions Architect at cognition IT, where she combines her passion for designing and implementing Citrix solutions with her newfound love for DevOps automation, using PowerShell, REST APIs and JSON payloads to automate both on-premises and Cloud Infrastructure as Code solutions. Ever since she hosted introduction days for technical female student candidates Esther has shared her passion and knowledge for IT. As well as her experience in the CUGC Women in Tech mentorship program, founded by her and the other female CTPs. In addition to her MVP award for Cloud and Datacenter management, Esther is also awarded as a Citrix Technology Professional (CTP).

Henk Boelman

Cloud advocate @ Microsoft

Lars Klint

Azure Technical Instructor - A Cloud Guru

Lars is an author, trainer, Microsoft MVP, community leader, aspiring Microsoft Azure expert and part time classic car collector. He is heavily involved in the space of cloud computing services, especially Azure, loves HoloLens and mixed reality, and is a published author, solution architect and writer for numerous publications. He has been a part of the software development community for the past 20 years and co-organises the DDD Melbourne community conference, organises developer events with Microsoft, and also runs a part time car restoration business. He has spoken at numerous technical events around the world and is an expert in Australian Outback Internet.

Suzanne Daniels

Developer Engagement Lead

Suzanne recently celebrated her 20th year working in IT. This in a variety of roles ranging from developer, Linux/Open Source consultant to architect. Now knowing this, you might not be surprised that her motto is “Do what you love”. She’s very passionate about her family, technology and diversity & inclusion.

Seth Juarez

Cloud Advocate @ Microsoft

I am a Cloud Developer Advocate and also the main host of Channel 9. I received my Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science at UNLV with a Minor in Mathematics and completed my Master's Degree at the University of Utah in the field of Computer Science. I currently am interested in Artificial Intelligence specifically in the realm of Machine Learning. These days am working on a .NET library meant to simplify the usage of the common machine learning algorithms.

Sarah Maston

Sarah Maston, Senior Solution Architect & Founder of Project 15 from Microsoft

Sarah works with our partner ecosystem to build global scalable IoT solutions on Azure. She specializes in process architecture and data solution architecture. She is the founder of Project 15 from Microsoft (aka.ms/Project15) and the inventor of Project Edison, a safety notification solution accelerator for safe schools and workplaces, for which she won the Microsoft Polaris Award. In her 20-year career, she has architected many data warehouses out in the world including those at Monster.com, CouchSurfing.com, and Boston Medical Center. Prior to joining Microsoft, she won an Excellence & Eminence Award at IBM for the invention of the Nutrition Graph and an Outstanding Innovation Award for the invention of Simple Data Pipe.

Sander van de Velde

IoT Platform Architect at Atos and Microsoft IoT MVP

I'm an IoT Platform Architect at Atos and specialized in Microsoft Azure IoT. I’ve been presented with the 2017 – 2021 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for my Azure IoT community work. On a daily basis, I'm involved with most aspects of the Azure IoT Platform and Azure in general. I work on IoT innovations and I implement my findings in my daily work with partners, clients, and the community.