We are proud to announce the first wave of SSAS Maestros v1.0. After three 3-day sessions in Redmond, London, and Hong Kong in Feb/Mar 2011 with hundreds of applications and eighty one attendees, we now have the first wave of SSAS Maestros who completed the course and passed a comprehensive lab, exam, and case study. Once we resolve the logistics, we will be publishing some of these case studies on sqlcat.com as well!

• Ulf Ackermann (R1) is based out of Hamburg, Germany and is a BI specialist at Initions AG.
• Alberto Ferrari (R1) is a Business Intelligence consultant based in Italy serving Europe and the Middle East. His competency ranges over the whole Microsoft BI stack: SSIS, SSAS, PowerPivot, Data Modeling. His main interests are in BI development lifecycle methodologies and in the data modeling and performance tuning of large BI solutions, ranging from the ETL phase up to the most intricate MDX and DAX code development. You can follow him via @FerrariAlberto or his blog http://sqlblog.com/blogs/alberto_ferrari.
• Greg Galloway (R1) is a BI consultant for Artis Consulting in Dallas, TX since 2003. He has been recognized as a SQL Server MVP since 2008. He is a coordinator on several CodePlex projects including well known BIDS Helper, the Analysis Services Stored Procedure project, and OLAP PivotTable Extensions. He blogs at http://www.artisconsulting.com/blogs/greggalloway.
• Darren Gosbell (R1) is based out of Melbourne, Australia working for the BI consulting firm James & Monroe. He has been working with Microsoft OLAP solutions since 1999 starting with SQL 7.0; he has been a recipient of the MVP award since 2006, works on the BIDS Helper, AS Stored Procedures and PowerSSAS projects on codeplex and blogs at http://darren.gosbell.com.
• Dirk Gubbels (R1) is a Senior MCS Consultant with Microsoft Switzerland. He has been working with SQL server ever since 4.2, and with BI since it was released in SQL 7.0. He is doing mostly design and development of large SQL architectures, both in the OLTP space as in SSAS, for customers all over Europe.
• Michael Horne (R1) is based out of the UK (though is often in the US) and works for Thorogood Associates. He has been working in BI for about 13 years and with MS BI specifically since version 7.0.
• Vidas Matelis (R1) is a Business Intelligence consultant based in Toronto, Canada. He specializes in building data warehouse solutions using Microsoft technologies (SQL Server, SSAS, SSIS and PowerPivot). He has more than 12 years of experience in this area. He created and maintains the sites http://ssas-info.com and http://powerpivot-info.com; you can follow Vidas via @VidasM.
• Marco Russo (R1) is a Business Intelligence consultant and mentor based out of Italy and serving primarily in Europe. He has been working with SSAS since OLAP Server 7.0 release and has written several books, articles, and papers. He spends most of his time on Analysis Services (both Multidimensional and Tabular). You can review his blog at http://sqlblog.com/blogs/marco_russo and his twitter handle @marcorus.
• Harlan Smith (R1) is a Manager in the Business Intelligence and Performance Management practice at Hitachi Consulting, specializing in business intelligence engineering, architecture, and project/program management. You can follow him via @smithharlan or his blog http://harlansmith.net.
• Chris Webb (R1) is based out of the UK and he works as an independent consultant (www.crossjoin.co.uk) specializing in SSAS, blog at http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com, and have co-written two SSAS-related books.
• John Welch (R1) is a BI Architect at Varigence and have been working with MS BI technology since 2001. He is an MVP and blog at http://agilebi.com/jwelch

Some quick logistics for the future SSAS Maestro announcements:

• We will also be shorty announcing SSAS Maestros Bench whom upon successful completion of additional work, will also become SSAS Maestros (but deserve recognition shortly).
• For those wondering, SSAS Maestros v1.2 evaluations have not yet started and we are planning to announce the 2nd wave of Maestros most likely early next year.
• We will also be shortly announcing the first wave of sanctioned SSAS Maestro partner instructors.

A heartfelt congratulations to the first wave of SSAS Maestros from the SSAS Maestros team!

Note: Originally posted by Denny Lee on the SQLCat website: http:/sqlcat.com/sqlcat/b/technicalnotes/archive/2011/09/19/announcing-the-first-wave-of-ssas-maestros.aspx