Featured Speakers

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, referred to by The Economist as a "security guru." He is the author of nine books -- including the best sellers Beyond Fear, Secrets and Lies, and Applied Cryptography – as well as hundreds of articles and essays, and many more academic papers. His influential newsletter "Crypto-Gram," and his blog "Schneier on Security," are read by over 250,000 people. He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and radio, served on several government technical committees, and is regularly quoted in the press. Schneier is the Chief Security Technology Officer of BT

Brian is an Architect on the Identity and Access Management team for Microsoft’s internal IT department. He joined the company in 2001, as an Active Directory engineer deploying “Whistler”, which released as Windows Server 2003. He deployed the first production Active Directory Federation Service, and has been driving MSiT’s deployment into the cloud through the adoption of MS Onlnie Services and Windows Azure.

Kevin has been in the enterprise communications industry for 10 years, in development, implementation, project management and consulting roles across Asia Pacific. He believes that enterprises will benefit immensely when they start understanding that unified communications is not a sales buzzword, but is a real catalyst to creating the working landscape of the future – when communications and collaboration is a seamless and truly becomes a strategic business tool – and starts adopting unified communications.

Charlie has 20 years of experience in the Data Center Management space. He spent almost 7 years in IBM’s IT Outsourcing and 4 years in HP’s IT Outsourcing arm. Subsequently, he manage BMC Software’s regional Professional Services outfit for several years before joining Microsoft. Currently, Charlie leads the Security and Management product group for South East Asia

David Foo, a veteran in Microsoft for over 10 years, has under taken many roles in Microsoft. He is currently looking after the DPM business in SEA as the product manager in the regional team, He will take you through a session to introduce System Centre DPM and also how customers in the region have been benefitting from it.

Chris Estonina is the Desktop Virtualization Specialist based out of Microsoft's Regional Headquarters in Singapore. He focuses on providing Optimized Desktop solutions to enterprise customers, covering South East Asia and Korea. He is also deeply involved in the partner readiness program for Windows Client technologies. Chris has been doing regional work for more than 6 years now in a variety of technical sales and consulting roles covering network, security and system technologies.

Prasanna Amirthalingam is a technology consultant, technical author and trainer with more than 9 years of experience. He currently works for Readifyin Australia. He also works as a subject matter expert in technical authoring projects for various Microsoft certification exams and courses. He has been a Microsoft MVP for the past 6 years for his contributions to technical communities. You can read his blog at www.prasanna.ws

Joy Rathnayake is a SharePoint Mentor for Solid Quality Mentors. Joy has been developing application using Microsoft .NET technologies since 2002 and has been working with SharePoint Products and Technologies since 2006, including architecting, designing, implementing and developing portal solutions using SharePoint Products and Technologies. His experience spans a wide breath of industrial sectors including Airline, Training and Telecom. He is a product of NIIT and he has been working as a Consultant Trainer for past 9 years and he has trained a lot of cooperates in and out Sri Lanka. He has been working very closely with Microsoft Sri Lanka and Microsoft Learning Asia for bringing IT into everyone’s business. Joy is the only individual in Sri Lanka who has been recognized as both Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT).

Rushabh is a Business Intelligence Mentor for Solid Quality Mentors, based in US, and the Managing Director of Solid Quality India P.L. Rushabh has worked on architecting and building large and complex BI solutions for clients like Raymond James Financials, US Dept. of Defense, VA and recently architecting and implementing the analytics platform for Microsoft’s Windows Azure services. Rushabh also writes advanced courseware and regularly teaches private and public classes around the world. He is also an active and prominent speaker at many global conferences including PASS and Tech Ed and regularly speaks at SQL Server user groups world-wide. Most recently Rushabh co-authored a book on Problem-Design-Solution for SQL Server Integration Services.

Rushabh is also the President of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), a global organization founded by Microsoft and Computer Associates with more than 50,000 members and over 200 chapters in 50+ countries. Rushabh is also a SQL Server MVP.

Pinal Dave is a Microsoft SQL Server MVP actively involved in community service in India through his technology blog and website SQLAuthority.com. He proficient Principal Database Architect, Developer, Administrator and Project Manager specializing in SQL Server Programming with over 7 years of hands-on experience. He holds a degree in Masters of Science (Computer Networks) and has accomplished a number of certifications including MCDBA and MCAD (.NET). He is an expert in SQL Server 2008 / SQL Server 2005 technologies. At present, he leads two user groups - Gandhinagar SQL Server User Group and Ahmedabad SQL Server User Group. He has also been awarded Regional Mentor for PASS Asia. Since his time of working as a Teaching Assistant in the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, teaching has been Pinal's expertise and passion. From then on, he pursued his teaching role and taught various students groups, corporates and technology organizations as well as spoke in several SQL Server events. A profuse writer, he has authored around 1200 SQL Server articles at SQLAuthority.com and is a regular columnist for several prominent IT websites and magazines. His Blog articles range from SQL Server 2005 technologies and SQL Server 2008 to Business Intelligence.

Risman Adnan was a founding member of both MSDN and TECHNET SEA in Microsoft Regional Asia where he is currently a senior developer advisor on Developer and Platform group team which is responsible for building software development ecosystem in Asia. He provides technical leadership for developer community and software development advisory for Microsoft customers and partners.

Ed is a team member of the Asia Pacific Headquarters Developer and Platform Group based in Singapore. His role is centered around helping technical professionals become acquainted with and excited by Microsoft’s Platform technologies for creating great experiences for the Web as well as desktop computing scenarios. He is available for discussions of all types at edquek@microsoft.com.

T.N.C.VENKATA RANGAN (Venkat) is a Technocrat Businessman. He is the Founder & Chairman of Vishwak Solutions Pvt. Ltd., India and its two wholly owned subsidiaries in US and UK.

Founded in 1997, Vishwak is a pioneer in Web solutions for Media and Newspaper verticals. Under his leadership, Vishwak has grown into a multi-million dollar software services company. Venkat believes in the power of delegation and follows his signature style of non-confrontational management.

Venkat is an active speaker and has presented in various industry events and conferences. He is the Microsoft Regional Director for Chennai – an honorary title from Microsoft that he holds from 1999. One of the areas he is passionate about is language computing and he formalizes this by being the Chairman of INFITT.org, a Non-Profit Non-Government organization registered in California, USA. Apart from Vishwak, Venkat serves as the Director in LIFCO Publishers Pvt. Ltd, a 81 year old book publishing firm in South India.

Venkat has a Bachelors Degree in Engineering from University of Madras. Being a voracious blogger, Venkat can be easily reached at his popular blog at www.venkatarangan.com/blog

Mr. Darren Sim is an entrepreneur, consultant and public speaker in the area of technology, online marketing and presentation skills for over 5 years, providing services & solutions to MNCs, NGOs, government-linked organizations and enterprises in the Asia Pacific and Americas regions.

A firm believer of active learning, Darren believes that one has to constantly learn, unlearn & re-learn in order to enrich one’s self and the society. In his efforts to give back to society, Darren can be constantly found speaking at conferences, sharing on topics such as Emerging Technologies, Enterprise Project Management, Game Development, Electronic Marketing and Presentation skills, where he is frequently ranked among the top 25% speakers of each session.

In recognition for his efforts, Darren received numerous awards including the Oracle Corporate Singapore Prize, AVAYA Singapore Prize, Frontline Technologies Prize, IDA Singapore Course Silver Medal, Golden Web Awards, Microsoft’s Top Student Champion (FY06) and the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for 4 years in a row, placing him in the MVP Hall-of-Fame.

Most recently, Darren was also an invited member of the UN Expert Group Meeting on Public Private Partnerships (PPP) and MDGs implementation, held in Geneva, Switzerland.

Darren is currently director of several companies in the high-tech and education sector, committee member of several non-profit organizations and member of ACM and IEEE.

Working as a technology consultant at TCPAccess Dot Com, the main focus of the company is to provide premium web & email hosting services for SME in Malaysia.

Seok Chern holds Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in ASP/ASP.NET; Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) in Windows Server 2003; Microsoft Student Partners Malaysia Lead and EC-Council’s Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) credentials and has been active in the IT industry for over 8 years now.

Freddy Tan is a CISSP with a MSc in Information Systems Security from the University of London. His responsibilities include communicating Microsoft’s security strategy and architecture, identifying emerging security trends, and cultivating relationships with the governments, law enforcement, financial services industry, industry associations and academia to foster a spirit of collaboration and mutual support.

Freddy enjoys enabling emerging information communications (infocomm, for short) markets to “level up” their security posture so that they and their communities trust infocomm services. Before Microsoft, Freddy served with the Ministry of Defense, Singapore (MINDEF) and Singapore Armed Forces. In the course of his 25 years with the MINDEF, he was involved in many aspects of in infocomm security ranging from security policy formulation to security monitoring and incident response. During his time at MINDEF, he was also responsible for establishing the Ministry’s 24x7 Computer Security Monitoring & Investigation Centre (COSMIC) and the Singapore Armed Forces Computer Emergency Response Team (SAFCERT). He has participated as a working committee member on various infocomm security masterplan projects with the Singapore Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (iDA). He was also a member of the Singapore National Infocomm Competency Framework (NICF) Technical Committee. He was awarded the (ISC)2 President's Award in 2003 in recognition of his volunteer work with (ISC)2.

Lisa Tay is the CRM Sales Lead for Microsoft in the Asia Pacific region. In this role, she works with partners and account teams to solution Microsoft Dynamics CRM for customer-centric transformation in large enterprises and small and medium businesses.

Murali is the ERP Sales Lead for Microsoft in the Asia Pacific region. In this role, she works with partners and account teams to solution Microsoft Dynamics ERP for enterprise business transfortmation in large enterprises and small and medium businesses.

Over 13 years of industry experience and associated with Microsoft India since last 7+ years, in his current role he’s responsible for driving the IT strategy, Business management, Readiness and availability of Microsoft IT’s end-to-end service portfolio (Infrastructure, services, product deployment, IT budgets)

Rahul is the IT Manager for R&D division of Microsoft in Hyderabad & allied with Microsoft for about 3 yrs. He brings more than a decade’s experience in IT Project, Services & Business management. In his current role he is responsible for driving IT Strategy, Business management, Readiness and Availability of Microsoft IT’s end-to-end service portfolio (Infrastructure, Application, services, product/project deployment, IT budgets etc.)

He spends time with his wife & 9 month old Son whenever he is off work.

Aviraj is a Computer Engineer from Mumbai and is currently working with Microsoft India. In his present role he's accountable for managing IT Infrastructure of Microsoft India - West Region. He has concluded trainings on Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) and Sun Solaris System Administration (SCSA).

An active member of IT Professional communities across India specially Mumbai User Group and Pune User Group supported by Microsoft.

A real blogger, he is very compulsive on adding his thoughts to online blogs, forums, community and media and is very fanatical about speaking on IT Professional topics. He is a regular speaker at various Microsoft Events. You can check his blog at http://blogs.technet.com/aviraj

In his spare time he likes to spend time with his family, hang around with friends, listens to rock music and passionate about long drives

Rohan Perera is currently employed as an Architect at Virtusa (Pvt) Ltd. He graduated from the Manchester Metropolitan University in 2000. Rohan has over nine plus years of experience in the industry. He has been working on BizTalk close to an year.

Sridhar Poduri is a software development engineer and Consultant with 8 years’ experience in software, business, and systems engineering. He has a wide knowledge of software and technologies but excels in Windows client applications development; mobile application development, software engineering and component based development.