Eliaz Tobias's Blog

דרוש מוביל לתחום פיתוח התוכנה במיקרוסופט ישראל מול מגזר האקדמיה

Posted Wednesday, April 30, 2008 3:26 PM by eliazt | 2 comment(s)

A few things you didn't hear about the Developers & Platform Adoption (D&PE) Division in Microsoft Israel

This is the first time that I'm using my blog to write about the D&PE Division I'm part of in Microsoft Israel. Our Mission as a division is to work with our customers to help them adopt Microsoft's platform and our goal is to secure the future adoption of Microsoft's platform. To do that, we work with the ones developing the future projects and those are the developers, architects, R&D managers and even the executive levels when it comes to business development.

Recently, we decided to start and arrange the D&PE division around four main pillars:

1) Software Architecture & Platform Strategy - This is the group that I am now managing. My group consists of software architecture consultants that lead the software development domain across the different verticals. We work with customers in the Enterprises in Israel, large Hi-Tech ISVs, Government Offices, Academy and more.

We do this by consulting while leading processes of evaluating Microsoft solutions, architectures and technologies. We use our skills as architects and former software development managers and our knowledge of Microsoft's roadmap and technologies to assist our customers and partners in making the right choices before using Microsoft's products.

To tell you the truth, I really think we have one of the most interesting jobs in the Hi-Tech industry. In the same job, with some customers one can be a technologist, an architect or a consultant, while with other customers he can be the strategist or the business developer. When it comes to the broader community the same person can be the presenter in conferences or someone who gets interviewed in specific domains of expertise. And to someone who likes diversity, real impact and the broader picture, this is one of the few jobs in our industry I'd recommend.

Actually :-), I have an open cool position for which I'm looking for a consultant that will lead the vertical of the Academy and help faculty staff and students make the best use of our development technologies in the courses, curriculums, projects etc. If you are interested and the above descriptions match you and made you passionate and excited, you are invited to read more in the job description on this link.

2) ISV Business Development Management (BDM)- Some say that Israel is considered to be the second largest Silicon Valley with regards to the amount of startups and ISVs. Microsoft also has some very interesting business related programs for ISVs that export and decide to adopt our platform. The ISV BDM  group consists of a senior business development manager (BDM) and a software development consultant that focuses on technology and architecture with small and medium ISVs.

3) Community - This 3rd pillar focuses on the breadth R&D audience: one-to-many events, user groups, blogs, forums, written articles and newsletters and more. Some of the recent activities arranged are the development related tracks in Tech-Ed Israel, the successful Developers Academy event, the open code contest, the popular MS Israel Blogs site and the latest MSDN Pulse newsletter in Hebrew for developers.

4) Development Tools - Increasing Usage of Microsoft Development Tools with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team System. The focus in here is with product marketing, partner channels for product selling on one hand and for product deployment and usage on the other hand and making sure the share and revenue from these products is positive.

Well, that's us, the D&PE, in a nutshell.

If we can be of assistance to you or your organization, don't hesitate to send me an email and if you have suggestions or ideas with regards to our strategy or activities, please comment or send me another email.

Posted Thursday, April 24, 2008 3:19 AM by eliazt | with no comments

Summarizing the SOA and S+S Track in Tech-Ed

Wow, this was a great Tech-Ed.

In the last two months, I've been working with each and every one of the speakers to make their session become a blast. I have seen some of the speakers for more than 5 reviews and the results were just great.

The track started with a 15 minutes opening where I covered the why and the what behind SOA and S+S, the current and future Microsoft solution portfolio and finally the teaser to the track sessions.

Later on the first day,we've had an overview of the SOA infrastructures  including WCF, WF, ESB, ISB and Governance by Manu Cohen-Yashar. David Chappell, the legendary speaker that came to Israel, gave a great talk about the holy wars between REST and SOAP. Finally, at the Ask-The-Experts, we've had an interesting discussion into the night on Oslo's roadmap with some of our customers and some Microsoft representatives.

The second day started with an overview of BizTalk Server 2008 R2 where Ofer Ashkenazi revealed some of the interesting features such as the WCF adapters, BizTalk Services and also the roadmap to Oslo. In parallel, David Chappell gave a talk on S+S in another hotel.

Later, I've heard Viki Gaziel and Daniel Ben-Zikri from SRL giving the best talk I've heard so far on the Microsoft Enterprise Service Bus where they made it simple to understand the additional benefits that the ESB provides on top of the regular Microsoft offering for the SOA space.

Memi Lavi also gave a great demo-oriented talk on the Web Services Software Factory emphasizing the role that models will play in the future Oslo version. The afternoon continued with a practical guide on S+S from British Telecom, a technical talk by Ron Jacobs on REST and a marathon of case studies from Cellcom, Mizrahi Bank and Netvision that implemented SOA solutions based on Microsoft.

The last day started with a cool talk that surprised us all on RFID where Shahar Ron and Galbital gave a demo on how distributed applications can be extended to connect to RFID. Roi Agababa followed with a must-see presentation on SOA governance where Visual Studio compatible solutions like Logidex were demoed. The fun part of this talk was a three-part movie where the Chief Architect of the Phoenix Insurance Company was getting a so-called psychological treatment (BETIPUL). Later on, Udi Dahan gave a talk on architectural insights emphasizing the role of autonomous services and business components with regards to Pub-Sub and SLA. Unfortunately, I missed Shy Cohen's talk on on Service Taxonomy because I had a my flight scheduled to an early hour. Just before I left, I found out from Shy that he lost his voice on the party in the previous night. I just hope he was able to deliver the talk with a voice :-)

That's all for this time. Feel free to comment or send me your thoughts on the track if you attended. The presentations and webcasts will be posted on Tech-Ed Israel 2008 site later this month.

Posted Friday, April 11, 2008 10:13 PM by eliazt | 2 comment(s)