At the beginning of July, Microsoft announced the winners for their Microsoft Regional Director and Most Valuable Professional awards. At isolutions, we are delighted to count with Roger Pollini and David Schneider, both awarded with the two programs, as with Edin Kapic, who has also been renewed as Microsoft MVP.
We sat down with David Schneider, CTO and General Manager of Barcelona’s isolutions office, to talk all about this great event.
- What is the Microsoft Regional Director Program about?
This program is an advisory role for Microsoft Program Management and Senior Management. It is focused on strategic topics with a broader technology view and has around 200 participants worldwide (3 in Switzerland and 3 in Spain). Established in 1993, the program recognizes the world’s top technology visionaries for their proven cross-platform technical expertise, community leadership and commitment to business results.
- How do you become a Regional Director?
The nominees for the program are selected and awarded by Microsoft for a 2 years period.
- What is the difference between the Regional Director and the Most Valuable Professional program?
The key differences really come down to the business consultative nature, customer experience, and cross-platform architect skills possessed by RDs versus the deep technical focus on Microsoft technologies which qualifies an MVP.
- When you first became an MVP, what kind of technologies/programming languages were you using?
In 2015, when I was awarded for the first time as an MVP, I got it in the Office 365 category. At that time, I was working mostly with SharePoint and Office 365.
- What is the advantage of having a Microsoft Regional Director in the company?
For isolutions, it brings a high attention and an extremely close relationship to the highest decision-makers at Microsoft and an early access to technical and strategic news.
- What advantage does it have for customers when a company employs a Microsoft Regional Director?
As a RD, we have to possibility to tell Microsoft about the challenges and difficulties of our customers. We try to have an impact on the further development of the products and services.
- What additional knowledge does a Microsoft Regional Director bring to the company?
In today’s world, there is a lot of information around. The challenge is to focus on the information which is relevant for our customers. As a RD, we have the possibility to get this information unfiltered from top Microsoft executives.