Microsoft Developer Evangelists
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November 4, 2008 3:04 PM |
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Your Best Friends

If you are an ISV, or a managed partner of Microsoft, you should really find out who your field evangelist is.  No, you are not signing up for a new religion, but you might just meet your next best friend.

Microsoft seems to place a very high importance on their developer evangelist team; that is the only thing I can conclude after observing the quality of the members that make up those teams.  My expeience with the evangelist teams has been very enlightening.  I have found that they really focus on the needs of partners and do everything in their realm of influence to hook you up with the people, technologies, and early access programs in ways that are relevent to your business.  If you are an ISV that has a strategy of being an early adopter of Microsoft technologies, then you really need to meet some of these developer evangelists as they can add significant value to your business.

The developer evangelists seem to be broken into three sections.  The 'field evangelists' are out in the field with the sales teams.  These field evangelists have a region to cover, and should be the first person you meet right after your partner account manager.  These evangelists are well connected in Microsoft and if you spend some time with them to help understand your company and direction, they can be instrumental in assisting you in engaging with appropriate teams within Microsoft that is compatible to your goals as well as their strategic areas as well.  It also appears as though every major product in Microsoft has an evangelist that is a specialist in that product.  I believe these are called technical evangelists.  Hopefully your field evangelist will hook you up with appropriate technical evangelists as you start to work with new technologies.  Finally, the Dynamics team has its own set of evangelists.  This is probably because of the historical difference in the Dynamics family and the nature of the line of business applications that they deliver to customers through partners.  These evangelists are great too, especially if you are considering integration with any of the Dynamics family (such as CRM).

Unsung Heros

I don't believe the evangelist team in Microsoft gets enough credit.  The product folks typically take the center stage at conferences like PDC, but the evangelists are on the street, helping ISVs and customers succeed with Microsoft products.  I know our company would not be where we are at without the assistance, support, and encouragement we have had from a number of different evangelists.

Since I don't think they have enough credit, I am going to give them some personal Kudos here:

Ben Riga - Dynamics - Developer and Platform evangelist
I consider Ben a good friend.  He is someone who you can trust and someone who always gives good advice.  He is well connected in Microsoft and has his pulse on all the new technologies, even outside of the Dynamics family.  Perhaps that is one thing that makes him special because the Dynamics platform is really designed to be composed with other applications to integrate into a full solution.  Ben is a humble man and has a lot of wisdom - perhaps even beyond his years.  He has a great understanding of people and business, and when he speaks, I am prone to listening.  Ben has time and again gone out of his way to help me and my company.  Don't get me wrong - it has definately been in the interest of Microsoft as well, but nobody made Ben do it - he just did it out of the goodness of his heart, and well, that summarizes what I think of Ben.  Honorable mention must also be given to Girish, which is the other half of the 'Dynamics Duo'.  Girish has also helped a lot and I am certain that his support of Ben helps them to work together as a team to achieve amazing results.

Ryan Dunn - Technical Evangelist - SQL Data Services
I really lucked out by getting Ryan as my 'buddy' during a .Net 3.0 app compat lab.  Our CMS is heavily dependent on Active Directory, and Ryan is the guys who *literally* wrote the book on it, so the pairing was very useful.  I was lucky that we achieved our goals early in the lab experience, so Ryan was able to spend some time helping me understand some of the new technologies incubating in Microsoft.  I am kicking myself for not following up more with him in the last while because he was bang-on-the-money.  Everything that is important to me now was something that he introduced me to earlier.  The thing that I appreciate the most from Ryan is that I can count on sending an email and getting an almost instant response.  He has been instrumental in helping us convert our CMS to using SQL Data Services leading up to the PDC.  We would not have been able to achieve full support of Azure and SDS without Ryan's help.  Ryan is a younger guy and I have a lot of respect for him.  I look forward to seeing where he goes after his work on the SQL Data Services team comes to an end - I can pretty much guarantee that it will be in another interesting, relevent, and strategic area.  Maybe he will get his own office one day - I know he deserves it.

Jamie Wakeam - ISV Architect Advisor - Canada
Jamie is as close to a field evangelist as I can get.  He understands ISVs and the things that we need to be successful.  Jamie has sponsored us into so many early access programs that I cannot count.  My connect portal dashboard of connections is filled with things that Jamie helped with.  He has filled in a lot of paperwork on our behalf and I have been very grateful for his helpfulness.  Jamie works closely with our partner account manager, and as a team, these two seem to be our best marketers - at least within Microsoft.  I couldn't imagine a partnership with Microsoft without someone like Jamie guiding us as an ISV.

I should note that I know and have interacted with a number of other evangelists, but these three individuals deserve special attention and their 10 minutes of fame.  It probably took that long to read this blog post, so I am glad to have done my part. 

If anyone in Microsoft is listening - hang on to these guys - and other guys like them too.  I consider the evangelist team the secret sauce in Microsoft.   They hook customers and partners up with the teams, technologies, and information within Microsoft to help us all succeed.  I couldn't imagine partnering with another company as deeply as we do with Microsoft, and that feeling is deeply rooted in the performance and personalities of the evangelist teams.