Rock and Role of an Evangelist!

I am Nat Natarajan, Director of the ISV evangelism team responsible for engaging and enabling some of the largest ISV’s in the world to adopt our platform.  I am a fan of “team blogs” and it is with pleasure that I am joining our team of bloggers.  In my blogs, I plan to write on the relevancy of new Microsoft technologies to the ISV community, ISV’s doing interesting things on our platform, and hopefully also be able to share with you the excitement and challenges of being an evangelist at Microsoft!

In an earlier blog, Dan Lohmeyer referred to ISV Evangelists who engage with Global and Field ISV’s. These ISV evangelists are also referred to as ISV Developer Evangelists (DE) and work with ISV’s in all geographies around the world. A frequent question that I get asked is on the ISV DE role – that is “what does a DE at Microsoft do?”  DEs at Microsoft typically have a lot of software development background, are passionate about technology and get excited working with customers and partners.  With ISVs, DEs strive to be a “trusted advisor”, help ISVs understand the Microsoft roadmap, and ultimately work towards supporting the ISV to align their roadmap with Microsoft.  That is actually quite a challenging role if you consider the matrix of ISVs, their products, Microsoft technologies, people, travel, and processes.  But then, DEs thrive on such challenges and live for those “WOW” moments when their ISVs ship a product on latest Microsoft technology or make a commitment to migrate their flagship product to the Microsoft platform from a competitive platform.

And you are probably wondering what the DEs are evangelizing these days.  While our product teams are putting the finishing touches on the next wave of innovation - Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008 - on the evangelism side we are getting busy talking to ISVs about what is in it for them.  These products carry innovations from billions of dollars of R&D spending and they are available to ISVs that are willing to take advantage of these innovations and build state-of-the-art solutions to solve key industry and customer problems.  In addition to these upcoming product and technology releases, we are focused on others as well including latest .NET technologies such as SilverLight, WPF, ASP.net AJAX, Office Business Applications (OBA), High Performance Computing (HPC), and Dynamics.  In future columns, I will discuss the relevancy of these technologies and how ISVs are leveraging these platforms!!

I welcome your feedback.

Best,

Nat Natarajan

Director, Developer & Platform Evangelism

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 02, 2007
  PingBack from http://www.artofbam.com/wordpress/?p=4624

• Anonymous
  November 01, 2007
  If you are an ISV interested in Microsoft technology, then: Keep visiting here :-) And secondly, check

• Anonymous
  November 01, 2007
  If you are an ISV interested in Microsoft technology, then: Keep visiting here :-) And secondly, check

• Anonymous
  December 11, 2007
  Dear Nat, Further to what Dan Said regarding how MS works with ISV's and continuing to your view on Developer Evangelists (DE), wanted to check back if it is possible for a Microsoft certified gold partner to get a list of all Microsoft ISV's classified into Global, Field and Tele ISV. Thanks Sidd

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2007
  Thanks for your note.  We don’t publish a worldwide directory with all the ISVs we engage; this is information we keep internally.  However, it may be feasible for the local Microsoft team to work with you on key priorities, if you’re looking for particular partners to work with.   Best, The Microsoft ISV Team