Simon Guest, Microsoft Senior Director of Technical Strategy in the Developer and Platform Evangelism

Simon Guest is the Senior Director of Technical Strategy in the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) organization at Microsoft, responsible for helping developers worldwide deliver solutions using Microsoft technologies.

Since joining Microsoft in 2001, Simon has led the Microsoft Platform Architecture Team, acted as Editor-in-Chief of the Microsoft Architecture Journal, pioneered the area of .NET and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) interoperability, worked with customers on mission critical .NET solutions, and has been a regular speaker at many conferences worldwide, including PDC, TechEd, and JavaOne.

Before joining Microsoft, and with over 18 years in the IT industry, Simon held architect-level positions at many organizations, including Zoho Corporation, a Silicon Valley startup; Conchango, a UK based consultancy; and Herbert Smith, a leading law firm in the UK. He also worked for several years at GEC in its semiconductor manufacturing division.

Simon was born in England, and has been living in the U.S. for approximately nine years. He holds a Masters Degree in IT Security from the University of Westminster, London, and a Higher National Certificate in Software Engineering from Plymouth College. Simon is the author of numerous technical articles and books about Java, Microsoft .NET, and Web technologies, as well as maintaining a blog at http://simonguest.com.

Simon’s LinkedIn profile can be found here.

Presentation: "Panel: Data in the Cloud"

Track: Real Life Cloud Architectures

Time: Friday 16:50 - 17:50

Location: Olympic Room

Abstract: Scaling out the data tier has always been a challenge, but it is exacerbated in the cloud. By nature, cloud computing environments are dynamic and elastic. That, coupled with the fact that today's applications need to handle web-scale data volumes and transactions, makes the traditional approaches to data management unfeasible. This panel will discuss the unique challenges of managing data in the cloud -- and the solutions from a variety of perspectives: database-as-a-service, NoSQL, cloud-specialized relational databases and more.